Got a couple online orders to go before I think I will have a balanced retro system to specify here, but I think it may prompt helpful discussion bringing up whatever we ended up leaving out of our retro builds and our reasons for doing so. This is not talking about poor hardware you picked up that in hindsight was needless: I noticed that topic in another forum discussion. Rather, this is otherwise useful hardware that, for one reason or another, could not make the cut. I will lead...

Roland MT-32: was partial to the second model because only one game I am interested in (Wing Commander) used the bugs of the first model, not enough to be worth an investment; then besides the fact that the second model is much harder to find than the original, when I got my LAPC-I I realized I had the best of all worlds anyway

Media Vision Pro Audio Spectrum 16: was interested because of its cleaner digital sound and almost as wide support as the industry standard Sound Blaster 16, but with a powerful enough processor and an AWE64 in my setup I realized this was redundant (not that I could spare the ISA slot anyway)

Gravis Ultrasound: my research was fairly-conclusive that, if you have a powerful-enough Windows processor, none of these cards matter as much as their hype may say otherwise; whenever I want to experience the Gravis soundfonts in the Apogee and id games that used them I find DOSBox emulation to be quite sufficient

Roland GS cards: I had considered all of them at one point or another (preferably the daughtercard in order to save taking up another ISA slot), finally figuring I would rather go for the easier-to-find (and less expensive) SC-55 for its support of the original GS extensions that at least 5 games I know of use and only sound exactly right with the original module; according to my research, all the GS cards and the SC-55B changed the extensions slightly, not to mention their functions, in order to accommodate the General MIDI standard

Yamaha XG cards: may be much easier to find and less expensive than anything Roland, but this is usually a matter of taste and I was no different, plus almost no games were designed specifically for the XG standard

Ensoniq Soundscape Elite: I really, really wanted this because recordings online made it clear LucasArts games using General MIDI sounded absolutely beautiful with this thing, but it was impossible to find anything save the AudioPCI and, in the end, I realized I would only enjoy its use in a couple LucasArts games and lacked the additional slot anyway, so I will just live with Roland GS MIDI (which is most likely what these games were originally designed for anyway)

Rendition Verite cards: while the Diamond release of the V2100 is easy to find, I realized I would only be using it for games that are better on 3dfx; this was actually the card I most recently decided to cut from investing in because I had only one PCI slot left and figured the it would be best-utilized for the compatibility offered by my S3 ViRGE/325

PowerVR PCX cards: I had already decided on the 3dfx standard and figured these cards did not have anything unique to offer that made them worthwhile, plus they seem to be impossible to find

Post-AWE64 Sound Blasters: figured I am not interested in utilizing EAX extensions on my retro build, all the games taking advantage of them work fine on my modern desktop (which is the one with the 5.1 setup anyway)

ATI 3D cards: yeah, right; it was definitely NVidia setting the standard after 3dfx died, and Truform seems to be finicky

Network card: I do have a 3Com that came with the computer (so I may temporarily replace my S3 card if I need to do a file transfer), but retro games tended to do multiplayer over serial connections instead of ethernet

Would love to hear your thoughts. Any major disagreement? Please, discuss this and your own.