I once bought an Nvidia MX series video card from Wal-Mart back when i still had a crappy P2 computer with XP. I later took the video card and smashed with a big cast iron starter motor, i was upset to say the least. Any time I tried to run a 3D game windows would insta-BSOD.

A Palmtop with Windows CE 2.11. I paid $900 for it in the late 90's. Windows CE never really took off and there wasn't enough software it would run.

The Phenom Express was made by LG. There was no hard drive, but it had 32 MB RAM for storage and ran a RISC 100 MHz. It ran programs pretty quickly, but software titles were lacking. It had IE 3 and ran most websites in 1999. The VGA port only worked with Powerpoint slides. I was able to play Mp3s on the mono speaker and connect to the internet with my cell phone at 9600 baud. You could also connect PCMCIA devices to it, like a cell modem, serial port card, or CF card.

Due to the lack of software titles, it could never really replace a laptop or desktop, so it ended up being more of means to check my e-mail on the road. Websites also quickly out grew IE 3, so this was only useful for about 1 year. I used it up until 2005 to connect to Linux via the command console.

I let it go for $75 of eBay in 2006.

Hatta wrote:

All of my Neo Flash flash cart gear. I bought a genesis flash cart, an N64 flash cart, and a PCE flash cart, before there were other options available. I should have known better than to send away to China for custom hardware that reads propriatary flash modules, but I had money at the time and they were the only option. Had I known the Everdrive family of flash carts were on the horizon I'd have waited.

I know what you mean. I was thinking of getting one for my Mega Drive, but Krikkz came out with the Everdrive and that was the end of bullcrap flashcards like that. Not only were Neo Flash cards very expensive (I think they typically cost 2x maybe even 3x the cost of Everdrive carts) but they were kind of a pain to get games to work properly. On the everdrive it's pretty much plug and play.
I'm guessing the N64 versions didn't fare any better (only perhaps money wise, but I think they still cost a crap ton).

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I was using this card on a 440BX board with 700MHz PIII and 2X AGP. I paid over $300 for this card, and all it did was make my glide games look terrible. The only positive I can add is that it made counterstrike run slightly faster. The 2D section of my card was also all washed out and blurry. In fact, I believe many Nvidia cards suffered from this problem until DVI use became common.

I don't get it. You must have been only using Glide at the time or generally not very power hungry games. My brother used to run a PIII 733 on an i815 board with a Riva TNT2 and he bought a GF2 MX in mid 2001 I think. There was a huge difference in speed .
I know what you mean about the blurry 2D output though. GeForce cards can be very blurry, not all of them are like that though (DVI pretty much fixes that). I've had quite a few GeForce cards that were equal in output quality to my 3dfx cards.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

-Sound Blaster CT2230, Sony CDU-33A 2X CD-ROM "value" package.
At the time I didn't find the SB16 was much better than the SB 2.0 I already had, and the spring loading proprietary Sony drive was a slow pile of shit. It was their first attempt at creating an affordable CD-ROM drive for the masses. I should have just gotten a cheap Future Domain SCSI card and a nice NEC drive.

All 2x drives that weren't SCSI were slow pile of shits
it's funny to note that in 1994, PC Magazine did a test on 2x CD-ROM drives and declared the CDU33A the fastest... that didn't matter to me though because the CPU usage from that thing sucked (I have one too)... the "slower" CR563B I also have had better CPU usage and felt faster in real world use... I bet those Mitsumi drives weren't too shabby either, but I never cared to deal with it because those were the dark ages of precious resource management (Mitsumis loved to have their own IRQ)... and if I were to waste resources, I rather waste it on SCSI (couldn't afford it back then)

anyway, I got suckered into the Creative CSP upgrade and the WB2... one was pretty much useless, the other sucked... wished I gotten the DB50XG instead, which I finally did a couple of years ago 🤣

All the stupid scsi stuff I bought from around the time of pentium 90. it was loud, expensive and added layers of complexity that held me in its grip for years... All because I was really uninformed and a friend told me that I really really should go SCSI "the best thing in the world". Bah!

SCSI was pretty awesome if you could afford it. But you had to be careful, because some SCSI drives were really IDE drives with SCSI interfaces. Back then I wouldn't have bothered with $C$I HDDS, but it would have been totally worth it for CD-ROM drives. A Future Domain non-DMA SCSI card could be had for about 40 bucks.

I'm glad I'm not the only one that hated the CDU 33A. They were really noisy when loading too. I think it might have had to do with the indicator light. Instead of just using a plain old LED, they used this transparent plastic panel that would slide back and forth. One half was green coloured (idle), and the other half orange (busy). I think the indicator even had its own motor. Exactly how is this better or cheaper than a plain old LED? They should have used that money to give the thing a proper eject mechanism instead.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

-AMD K6-200
Early adopter. Said to be faster than Pentium Pro. It seemed like a good buy at the time, but the stupid thing ran too hot and had a shitty slow FPU. Ran at a stupid 2.9V (instead of standard 2.8v). Should have gotten the P166MMX for the same price and overclocked to 200.

"Shitty slow" FPU? Even Intel's FPU was considered mediocre if the scope wasn't limited to x86.

To be fair the slow FPU (compared to Pentium) wasn't a big deal at the time of purchase. It really ran way too hot though. this was fixed with a die shrink six months later. This is the price I pay for being an early adopter.

Something that I've posted several times around the Internet throughout the years (refering to when I first bought a *CRAP* Wave Blaster 2):

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The Wave Blaster 1 sounded great 😀 It had 4 megabytes of compressed ROM samples, and was based on the E-mu Proteus 1, Proteus 2, and Proteus 3 line of rack-mounted MIDI modules.

I remember buying a Wave Blaster 2 when it first hit the store shelves, and being quite excited that the EMU-8000 processor chip on that MIDI daughterboard provided REVERB AND CHORUS effects. I was drooling on my way home thinking about it... As, although the Wave Blaster 1 sounded EXTREMELY realistic, it was "dry as a bone" (having no reverb or chorus effects processors).

After installing the Wave Blaster 2 and giving it a whirl, I thought something must be TOTALLY screwed up or wrong with my ears... as the Wave Blaster 2 - EVEN WITH it's reverb and chorus effects - sounded like PURE CRAP compared to my Wave Blaster 1!

I then quickly discovered that the Wave Blaster 2 HAD ONLY 1MB of ROM samples <uggh>!

I packaged it up, returned it to the store, and had my money refunded the exact same day!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I almost forgot about Zip drives. I bought one of those piles of garbage too. I bought a "Zip Plus" which was a hybrid parallel port / SCSI drive and it was actually much less reliable than the regular models.

I bought a Jaz drive a while ago. It sometimes works, but most of the time it will fail writing a big file. I have a bunch of Jaz disks and checked several of them so it must be a hardware problem.

I bought a Syquest SparQ parallel drive a few months before Syquest closed its doors...at the time I did hesitate between an external Nomaï drive (the company was on the brink of closure or maybe already closed), a CD burner and the Syquest.
I used it with the only cartridge I had at the time to backup stuff and do some file transfer between my Pentium 200 and an old laptop.
Not the best hardware I bought.

I got a Matrox m3D and the first accelerated 3d game I bought some times later wasn't fully compatible with the PCX2...graphics issue all around, I should have gone for a Voodoo2 in retrospect, but I liked Matrox more at the time...

I bought a Realmagic Hollywood+ MPEG-2 decoder card with my first DVD-rom drive (a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive from Ricoh in fact).
Atleast the Hollywood+ was capable of outputting video files (avi/divx/whatever) to the TV with a 3rd party software, thing is in a box now and will probably never see the light of day again.
I almost bought a PhysX card when it was released, that would have been a mistake...

Amusing anecdote: I bought all the hardware listed in the same store, one of the last time I went (I don't know how many years ago), I bought a dozen SparQ cartridges for 1 euro a piece. They were listed at 30 euros I think, I had to haggle with the salesman for 1 minute or so, most of them are still sealed.

lolo799 wrote:

I bought a Syquest SparQ parallel drive a few months before Syquest closed its doors...at the time I did hesitate between an ext […]
Show full quote

I bought a Syquest SparQ parallel drive a few months before Syquest closed its doors...at the time I did hesitate between an external Nomaï drive (the company was on the brink of closure or maybe already closed), a CD burner and the Syquest.
I used it with the only cartridge I had at the time to backup stuff and do some file transfer between my Pentium 200 and an old laptop.
Not the best hardware I bought.
I got a Matrox m3D and the first accelerated 3d game I bought some times later wasn't fully compatible with the PCX2...graphics issue all around, I should have gone for a Voodoo2 in retrospect, but I liked Matrox more at the time...

I bought a Realmagic Hollywood+ MPEG-2 decoder card with my first DVD-rom drive (a combo CD-RW/DVD-ROM drive from Ricoh in fact).
Atleast the Hollywood+ was capable of outputting video files (avi/divx/whatever) to the TV with a 3rd party software, thing is in a box now and will probably never see the light of day again.
I almost bought a PhysX card when it was released, that would have been a mistake...

Amusing anecdote: I bought all the hardware listed in the same store, one of the last time I went (I don't know how many years ago), I bought a dozen SparQ cartridges for 1 euro a piece. They were listed at 30 euros I think, I had to haggle with the salesman for 1 minute or so, most of them are still sealed.

Those RealMagic Hollywood+ cards had fantastic VGA and TV output quality. Easily as good as some of the more expensive DVD players around at the time. Plus they ran on even lowly machines such as Pentium 133s. I remember my brother using the unofficial player that could play DivX files, was a cool little trick.

I was given a Hollywood 2 at some point; it had the most awful picture quality ever!

I blew ~ $200 on some ATI PCIe TV Tuner cards with the Theater 550 and Theater 650 chips. One was an OEM card I got from ebay, the other a MSI retail card from Newegg. Both were brand new. Motherboards would sporadically detect their presence and I could only get them to work in XP. Should have returned them.

There was also my '98 Sony 2x CD writer. It probably made more coasters than anything else. Burning on Win98 via ATAPI and not having buffer underrun protection was insanity. But it was so damn cool to have a burner at that time. 😁 I threw away $100s in coasters in the end though at $2/CD-R.

swaaye wrote:

There was also my '98 Sony 2x CD writer. It probably made more coasters than anything else. Burning on Win98 via ATAPI and not having buffer underrun protection was insanity. But it was so damn cool to have a burner at that time. 😁

I had a 4x of those, can't remember if it had buffer underrun or not, but I remember I had to not use the PC at all to avoid either crashes or coasters for 20 min while it did it's job. Burning CDs were serious business. Also you had to pay quite a lot for a disc, so a coaster were costing both money and time.

rfnagel wrote:

Something that I've posted several times around the Internet throughout the years (refering to when I first bought a *CRAP* Wave […]
Show full quote

Something that I've posted several times around the Internet throughout the years (refering to when I first bought a *CRAP* Wave Blaster 2):

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The Wave Blaster 1 sounded great 😀 It had 4 megabytes of compressed ROM samples, and was based on the E-mu Proteus 1, Proteus 2, and Proteus 3 line of rack-mounted MIDI modules.

I remember buying a Wave Blaster 2 when it first hit the store shelves, and being quite excited that the EMU-8000 processor chip on that MIDI daughterboard provided REVERB AND CHORUS effects. I was drooling on my way home thinking about it... As, although the Wave Blaster 1 sounded EXTREMELY realistic, it was "dry as a bone" (having no reverb or chorus effects processors).

After installing the Wave Blaster 2 and giving it a whirl, I thought something must be TOTALLY screwed up or wrong with my ears... as the Wave Blaster 2 - EVEN WITH it's reverb and chorus effects - sounded like PURE CRAP compared to my Wave Blaster 1!

I then quickly discovered that the Wave Blaster 2 HAD ONLY 1MB of ROM samples <uggh>!

I packaged it up, returned it to the store, and had my money refunded the exact same day!

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-

The WB2 actually has 2MB ROM... that being said, crap is still crap
Now if you ever come across a WB1, let me know 😉

swaaye wrote:

I blew ~ $200 on some ATI PCIe TV Tuner cards with the Theater 550 and Theater 650 chips. One was an OEM card I got from ebay, the other a MSI retail card from Newegg. Both were brand new. Motherboards would sporadically detect their presence and I could only get them to work in XP. Should have returned them.

There was also my '98 Sony 2x CD writer. It probably made more coasters than anything else. Burning on Win98 via ATAPI and not having buffer underrun protection was insanity. But it was so damn cool to have a burner at that time. 😁 I threw away $100s in coasters in the end though at $2/CD-R.

I got a 4x MatSHITa SCSI burner back in 98... by that time, I got a hand me down AHA-2940U SCSI card to run it.... it was more expensive than the IDE version, but was worth it... I had less issues with buffer underruns compared to my friend who got the IDE version of that same drive.... for him, he couldn't do anything for an hour while burning (he always used simulation mode) while I was able to do basic things, like ICQ and web browsing... it was the most affordable quality SCSI burner I could get back then, but it was still crap... it couldn't overburn and I RMA'd that thing TWICE... first time it was because of a SCSI connector terminal that got pulled off the PCB, second time was when I burned that laser out and it wrote bad sectors towards the end of discs... that taught me a lesson of not doing marathon burning sessions 🤣 (despite the fact that most media you could buy back then were quality ones made by TDK, Mitsubishi or Taiyo Yuden)... I still avoid using it as a reader though because burners back then were expensive, slow to load discs, and not have reliable lasers from heavy use

boy did I wish I was able to afford a Plextor or NEC back then

I still have this burner, it still works 🤣
not that I will ever burn anything with it again I don't think!

Funny, it seems easier to expunge the bad feeling of a crappy buy than the sinking regret of having thrown out something you wish you hadn't...

There was also my '98 Sony 2x CD writer. It probably made more coasters than anything else. Burning on Win98 via ATAPI and not having buffer underrun protection was insanity.

I went with a Yamaha 6x4x16 SCSI burner. I really liked that drive, but sadly it died after only a few years of use. It's the only optical drive I've ever seen with an internal fan. I wanted to replace it with a SCSI DVD writer, but I think everyone had given up on SCSI by then.

Anonymous Coward wrote:

I went with a Yamaha 6x4x16 SCSI burner. I really liked that drive, but sadly it died after only a few years of use. It's the only optical drive I've ever seen with an internal fan. I wanted to replace it with a SCSI DVD writer, but I think everyone had given up on SCSI by then.

My Yamaha SCSI burners never lasted more than 2 years. The first one I bought was replaced under the 1-year warranty, the replacement lasted about 18 months. They worked well while they were alive.

I always suspected that the internal fan got plugged up with dust and stopped spinning, causing the drive to cook itself. Never really took the time to fully investigate.