I might still have the original CD. I bought a kit in 1994. I'll have to check when I get home. But I believe it was 2.0.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I might still have the original CD. I bought a kit in 1994. I'll have to check when I get home. But I believe it was 2.0.

Thanks for helping

I have a BNIB "Edutainment 16" kit... it came with Aldus Photostyler SE 2.0, which is a stripped down version, but the full thing... it's on a CD along with many of the other programs part of the kit

Yep. I just checked. I got Aldus PhotoStyler SE 2.0 with my bundle as well.

My "bundle" really sucked hard. I got:

-A crappy Sony CDU-33A 2X proprietary interface CD-ROM Drive
-SB16 CT2230 (the only good thing in the box)
-crappy labtec speakers
-Aldus Photostyler 2.0 SE
-HSE Digital Morph
-Groliers Encyclopedia
-Lemmings
-Indy 500

Since I didn't get any CD-ROM games, I never really considered this much of a bundle.

Thanks all buddies

The Sony CDU-33A is not so fast thats true and in retrospect it looks feature wise not so good, but it was cheap.
I actually started with CD-ROMs on PCs with this drive and there were a few reasons to pick exactly this drive.
First one of course the price tag, it costed 230 DM in 1994. This was cheap compared to the SCSI drive alternative, that would have also required to buy a SCSI controller. No-Caddy was another argument. And transfer works also if you set it to pure PIO, saving IRQ/DMA resources. Speed was not a high priority issue. You couldn't watch videos on a 386 anyway and most video playback solutions required a 4x speed drive.

In your bundle wasn't the microphone included?

Ah yes. I forgot that crappy labtec microphone. I finally tossed it out a year or two ago.

I think my creative bundle was around $400 canadian dollars. As I already had a soundcard, I would have been much better off with a nice NEC 2X SCSI drive an a cheap future domain SCSI controller (sometimes they cost less than $50). CD-ROM caddies are okay by me. Realistically you only need to have one anyway. They run silently, unlike the CDU 33A which couldn't shut the hell up.

My friend bought a similar Creative 2X CD-ROM bundle, and ended up with the Matsushita CR-563B drive. Not only was his drive better, he also got a few pretty nice CD-ROM games too. I think he paid exactly the same price too.

It's especially pathetic when there were better bundles at the same 1994 timeframe, like Diamond for example... which was just gaming packed along with a 2X CD-ROM and a WSS soundcard. It's also got the obligatory encyclopedia disc too, but this one had PATRICK STEWART so it's better!!!

Anonymous Coward wrote:

-Lemmings

🤣 I remember when the world was going crazy over this game...

leileilol wrote:

It's especially pathetic when there were better bundles at the same 1994 timeframe, like Diamond for example... which was just gaming packed along with a 2X CD-ROM and a WSS soundcard. It's also got the obligatory encyclopedia disc too, but this one had PATRICK STEWART so it's better!!!

Don't forget, though, that a lot of companies used to use software bundles to help them move hardware that wasn't exactly top of the range. So even though you may have been able to buy something like a SiS6326 video card with 6 full games that were past their sell by dates packed in, it was still a SiS6326 and would suck for a lot of more recent games. The bundled games, because they were older and didn't push the video card very hard, would give you a false impression of what it was capable of.

I was wondering why I had a copy of Indy 500.