-snip- pre wallet era. When I was mining we didn't have wallets showing all the coins available.
You may have misremembered it, there's no such "
pre-wallet era".
In the very old versions including the first release, Bitcoin Core will create a default wallet for you.
The difference is:
You'll have to explicitly create a wallet in the new versions and it's possible to have multiple wallet.
It wasn't possible to create multiple wallets back then aside from manually swapping wallet.dat files.
For mining in the old version: When you tick "
Generate Coins", it'll auto-select one of your wallet's address in the background.
And of course, it will not show coins if you didn't mined a block since it's solo mining (
either 50BTC or zero, not a coin or two) or no one sent you bitcoins.