First post, by furan
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Hi,
I'm working on an idea for a gimmick PC, basically something that has a lot of gimmicks from the 386-486 era (1989-1996 roughly, and yes, I realize that overlaps Pentium). Here are some examples of items in my collection that I'm talking about:
TechMedia speaker case
Gimmick: it sounded bad, and the magnets on the speakers were unshielded.
TEAC PA-10 personal amplifier.
Gimmick: this was for Karaoke in Japan, after the long workday. Mostly I did this because the amp in the TechMedia case sucks, but it also adds a VU meter.
Newq Gold. Stupid VFD for a drive bay. I can't use this and the TEAC PA-10 at the same time, not enough room.
Gimmick: not a real spectrum analyzer
NEC PC-FX GA A PC-FX with a 3D accelerator that hardly anybody wrote code for. A DOS/V ISA card, it and the software work fine on DOS/english Windows 3.11, aside from character set.
Gimmick: poor adoption of the PC-FX means fewer games, and barely any that support the (quite capable) 3D accelerator. Still cool.
Creative Labs 3DO Blaster Yep, that one.
Gimmick: 3DO had poor adoption, not a lot of great games.
NVIDIA NV1/Diamond Edge 3400 This can't work in the same system as a 3DO Blaster. It requires a video card with a VESA feature connector that implements pixel bus (giving the numeric values for the current pixel that are palette lookup table in the DAC, digitally, to another card, so it can decide when to do color-key overlay). But I think in a dream world, I can probably figure out a way to talk to the RAMDAC to get the pixel bus and enough signals to make it work. I might experiment with this and a different card.
Gimmick: hard to call this one a gimmick. It's really more that programming for the quadratic texturing was hard.
Gravis Ultrasound Classic
Gimmick: low amount of support, SB emulation drivers suck. Great for demoscene, though.
Miromedia Surround Dolby Pro Logic decoder
Gimmick: Not a lot of games had surround back then.
3D Blaster VLB
Gimmick: one of the first consumer 3D accelerators. Limited performance due to low amount of VRAM.
Here's a photo of this system (not yet built to specs) running both of the console cards at the same time:
Here is a video of the PA-10 in action:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFF2tDFsBLU
I want to hear about the gimmicks you remember from this era.