Comment by to11mtm
7 days ago
Oh if we're going through that sort of list....
- Virtual Boy, Atari Lynx,
Hardware:
- AMD Interwave. practically ruined Gravis and left us with years of Creative gobbling up any competitor i.e. Ensoniq, Aureal... FFS we had to wait for VIA to make something competitive to Creative's offerings, outside of 3-ish beautiful Cirrus Logic 4624/4630 cards, before the Envy24 became a thing.
- Speaking of Cirrus Logic, The Laguna CL-GD546X series of chips; those things used RDRAM in the mid-90s and it contributed to Cirrus exiting the video market.
- Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
- (Kinda) the Matrox M3d (and the VideoLogic counterpart). It wasn't a terrible product in and of itself but a Riva 128 was faster (if uglier) for most cases and gave you 2D as well, and they came out around the same time. [0]
- Most 'cartridge disk' drives aside from the Zip[1]. You can possibly throw SuperDisk/HiFD into this category too.
- Intel i820 Chipset (It's 1999!). I'm not referring to the 'lemon' aspect (i.e. when an MTH was used for SDRAM, the RDRAM was reliable... AFAIK with two slots instead of 3) but in general there was almost zero uptake due to the cost of RDRAM and Intel's recalcitrance led to both AMD gaining ground as well as VIA/SiS getting opportunities to be more competitive in the chipset space (SiS 630 was cheaper than 810E and just as good for normal users, Via's Apollo Pro 133A both supported 133Mhz FSB and gave an AGP slot, as well as IDE corruption with an SBLive... I think i815 was 4-6 months after VIA stuff was selling, and remember back then 6 months was an eternity...)
Also I should note that the Saturn was mostly a flop in the US (Can't speak for EU.) but in Japan it held up well thanks to native publishers, the Saturn had a lot of great 2D games we never saw here, (thanks to the same guy that ironically caused the relative dearth of good RPGs for the PS1 before he moved from Sony to Sega...) also the ability to play CD+G (gotta have that karaoke) and I think? it could do VCDs which were bigger over there... all that stuff helped a lot and the Saturn outsold there till around 1997 IIRC.
[0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
[1] - Zip had reliability problems, but certainly was not a flop.
> [0] - That said, wow, remember when 3d processors didn't even need a heatsink? I feel old...
And we had VGA passthrough cables, because 2D rendering was still taken care of by a discrete card.
Pedantically (also semi-curiously) the Matrox M3d didn't need passthrough. Not sure of specific mechanics but AFAIR it was a flat blank slot cover.
> Speaking of Creative, the 3D Blaster VLB. They exist, (heck IDEK if the original rebel moon came any other way,) but they are rare as hell which means they probably flopped hard.
I just had to check to see if you meant 3DO Blaster and not just 3D Blaster. I'd imagine both are very rare.
NGL 3DO Blaster (and NV1 Stuff to an extent) is a good call out. I also almost listed MPEG cards but I think they had various industrial uses (maybe?)
Then once Creative made a decent UI for an MP3 player, Apple goes yoink, look at this innovative iPod.
And yet they couldn't even 'get the message' to really fix their pricing model one way or another to keep Sandisk from eating a good chunk of (if not overtaking them in) most of the 'non Apple flash storage' player market.
They were a company that thrived on a combination of clever mis-marketing [0] and poor reseller treatment [1]. Their actions likely hurt the evolution of computer audio due to the capture of various patents and companies that were actually innovating (Ensoniq being the big one.) I mean FFS it took VIA and and upstart to finally raise the bar [2] in a meaningful way, and the overall lack of competition left Creative ill-prepared to handle Azalia.
[0] - i.e. Audigy settlement.
[1] - When I worked at a computer shop, around 2001 we established a rule, 'no creative product under 50$ retail will be worth the cost of trying to RMA it'. If an SBLive or 52x CD drive came in bad we'd try but if it didn't get through on first go you'd wind up in a loop where the labor time wasn't worth replacing one. Which makes me extra disgusted because that's what everyone does now with actual end consumers.
[2] - That said, that VIA/IC Ensemble did the Envy24 thing when they did is interesting, at least in the context of the XBox 360 using an SIS 'Southbridge'. Makes me wonder if they were being bold to get the bid instead?
I guess the Rendition Vérité accelerator cards are also contenders.
I was afraid to go down the rabbit hole of 3D Accelerator dead-ends... admittedly because I'd diverge into weird tangents.
I'm willing to 'write-off' most early proprietary API cards, OTOH 3d Blaster VLB was so memory holed that if it wasn't for LGR I'd thought it was a Mandela effect hallucination...
The Jaz Drive seemed pretty good, just twice as expensive as needed.
I knew a couple people who had one and it was really handy, nothing comparable (except switching actual hard disks) existed, for a brief moment in time - must have been around 1998-99, no ubiquitous USB sticks, no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).
Us plebs had to make do with 100MB parallel port zip drives.
Some Jaz Drives suffered from problems that could vaguely sound like (but were fairly physically different from) Click-Of-Death. We had an early one, they got announced around 95 and I think we got one in 97 to replace tapes... alas when we actually needed to read data... Dad had to redo all his MIDIs because of that one. (Ironically none of our Zip drives failed and he used one up sometime between Vista and Win10... I think the same one...) [0][1].
> no CDRW yet (only CDR, at 5 bucks a piece).
IIRC Jaz cartridges were expensive back then, 100$ a pop. Launch price of 100$, back then 500$ could buy you a car that might last through an oil change or two. [1]
That said, The Castlewood Orb was a far more interesting piece of machinery due to capacity/cost. I have never seen one, but I do have a SyJet somewhere that I never hooked up to a PC [2]
[0] - FWIW the Jaz in question was a SCSI model with parallel port adapter. Not sure if it makes a difference...
[1] - It took a long time to fully reclaim my dad's confidence in purchase suggestions, wasn't finally conquered till a year after he ditched a problematic Chrysler Sebring for a Chevrolet Malibu (at which point he said I was glad I suggested it. Which I'm eternally grateful for...)
[2] - Got it used cheap way back when, I preferred SCSI CDRWs and thus had at least one competent Adaptec card for the task and a colleague was like 'hey since you can use it...'