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Reply 21 of 129, by Stiletto

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I thought SuperDisc drives were very neat in concept. Will probably think of more later. 😉

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do the Fandango!" - Queen

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Reply 22 of 129, by Lo Wang

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The SONY Memory Stick / Floppy Disk Adapter for Mavica's. I thought "this is it, we've arrived!".

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 23 of 129, by kreats

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Magneto Optical drives seemed pretty magical.

Virtual Reality headsets are coming back - but they did flop at the time (fun fact: the VFX-1 headset used ACCESS.bus, a usb-like tech that didn't catch on)

Last edited by kreats on 2016-02-22, 10:06. Edited 3 times in total.

Reply 24 of 129, by Standard Def Steve

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MUSE LD, an analog High Definition laserdisc. I've always been a fan of the Laserdisc format & still have 78 movies in my collection, but I've never seen a MUSE LD rig in action.

Another fascinating flop: D-VHS, a digital format that stored MPEG-2 video (at 720p or 1080i) and Dolby Digital/DTS audio on VHS tapes.

SiS R658: an RDRAM chipset for the P4. The chipset's memory performance was so weak that only Abit ever made an R658 board. They discontinued it so quickly that I'm not sure if the board even made it to market. I remember reading a few reviews, but don't recall ever seeing one for sale.

P6 chip. Triple the speed of the Pentium.
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Reply 25 of 129, by Lo Wang

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Another one from just a fee years ago was the Crystal LED technology developed by SONY, and had they chosen to go forward with it, we'd now have flatpanel desktop monitors worth using.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 26 of 129, by Stiletto

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I remembered another: Micron Semiconductors Samurai chipset. Capable of dual CPU dual AGP motherboards (Known as Micron Madison)! Never actually released in that form factor, and the single CPU single AGP was rare verging on unreleased. 😀 I guess that's not actually a flop though, more like vaporware. We could probably name all sorts of unreleased tech that fascinated us 😁

If vaporware is okay, then I can name many more - I got a list 😁

"I see a little silhouette-o of a man, Scaramouche, Scaramouche, will you
do the Fandango!" - Queen

Stiletto

Reply 27 of 129, by bhtooefr

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The dual CPU Mini-ITX board: http://www.viatech.com/en/2005/03/via-brings- … -310-mainboard/

It actually launched, but I don't even remember hearing that it launched back in the day. And, by then, dual core Intel and AMD CPUs were a couple months away (although at 95 W TDP for the lowest power Pentium D, and 89 W for the lowest power Athlon 64 X2, versus 14 W total for a pair of 1 GHz Eden-Ns).

Reply 28 of 129, by Scali

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DracoNihil wrote:

FM Synthesis.

Not sure if it failed so much as that time just caught up with it.
I guess the same can be said for LA synthesis for example. It was a good technology at the time, but it no longer serves a purpose.
FM and LA synthesis are better than 'vintage' subtractive synthesis, but at the same time not quite as realistic as more advanced rompler/DSP tech.
At the same time they don't have such a characteristic sound as subtractive synthesis, so you don't see 'retro' stuff trying to emulate those specific sounds either, where you do get modern romplers/DSPs that do a digital approximation of subtractive synths.

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Reply 29 of 129, by alexanrs

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/\ Yeah. FM synthesis never flopped - it was superseded rather than failed. In fact, I'd say it was VERY successful at its time.

That being said I don't think I have anything to add to this thread. A weird combination of my relatively young age (26) and the fact that I'm not easily impressed I guess.

Reply 30 of 129, by Kerr Avon

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I wouldn't class the Dreamcast, Amiga, or any popular console or computer as a flop, really. As long has it has good games, and is still used by some people today, then even if it wasn't a massive success, it's not a flop. But machines that weren't too popular, and didn't sell too well, yes they were flops. The Atari STe for one - I bought one because I believed the hype that it was an Amiga beater. It wasn't, and even though it was a great machine, it didn't equal, let alone beat, the Amiga's performance, and even if it had it was irrelevant, since very few STe specific games were released. It's the only time I ever bought a machine that didn't have any games I wanted (well, it had lots of great games, thanks to being 99.% backwards compatible, but those games I played on the earlier STFM).

The Atari Jaguar is a strange case. It sold very few machines, around 250,000, has few games (I think less than a hundred in total), and even it's most hardcore fans struggle to list more than a few good games on it, but it's fan-base is very loyal and active. They even have fan run Jaguar conventions for fans to meet up, see new homebrew, play the games, and discuss everything Jaguar related. Compare this to, say, the N64 (my favourite machine), which sold 32 million machines (122 times as many as as the Jaguar sold), has nearly four hundred games, and it's game library includes some of the best games of all time (Super Mario 64, Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, etc), and yet the N64 's fan scene is much less dedicated than the Jaguar's, at least to judge from what I've seen on the 'net. And I've never heard of even one N64 convention.

The Jaguar never even had it's own commercial magazine, whereas the N64 had several. And lots of people list the N64 amongst their favourite consoles, but you almost never see the Jaguar mentioned in similar lists. Yet the Jaguar's fanbase seems much more active (if much smaller) than the N64's fan-base.

Reply 31 of 129, by vladstamate

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HD-DVD for games. Microsoft tried to use that with XBox360 but it flopped, as Microsoft never sold enough of them and most games came on DVD as well. In the end BluRay won that war and HD DVD failed on the movie side as well.

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Reply 33 of 129, by dexter311

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Kerr Avon wrote:

I wouldn't class the Dreamcast, Amiga, or any popular console or computer as a flop, really. As long has it has good games, and is still used by some people today, then even if it wasn't a massive success, it's not a flop. But machines that weren't too popular, and didn't sell too well, yes they were flops.

The Dreamcast sold so poorly, that Sega was forced to close its hardware division. That's a complete flop in my eyes.

Reply 34 of 129, by Scali

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dexter311 wrote:
Kerr Avon wrote:

I wouldn't class the Dreamcast, Amiga, or any popular console or computer as a flop, really. As long has it has good games, and is still used by some people today, then even if it wasn't a massive success, it's not a flop. But machines that weren't too popular, and didn't sell too well, yes they were flops.

The Dreamcast sold so poorly, that Sega was forced to close its hardware division. That's a complete flop in my eyes.

Yes, and you can say the same for Amiga.
Commodore had a huge success with the C64. The Amiga never reached anywhere near the same levels of success, and was the last computer ever developed by Commodore, before they went out of business.
I think the Amiga is a special case because developers just *loved* that thing. I think they just loved making games on it, even though the PC market was larger.
So yes, the Amiga received quite a few games, and some very good ones at that. But I'd love to see sales figures. I doubt the Amiga was the best-selling platform for most games. They probably sold most copies for C64 or PC.

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Reply 35 of 129, by brassicGamer

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PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Sony Mini Disc 😢

MiniDisc was a roaring success compared to MD-Data and Hi-MD. I loved MiniDisc as an audio recording format, particularly for exchanging mixtapes with DJ friends. I still have my MiniDisc Walkman.

The only issue was having to do everything in real-time. After recording a 74 minute mix you would have to listen to it all the way through and insert tracks at the right point to break it up. If you wanted to record that mix onto another media: 74 minutes. Worse than that, if you dubbed onto another MiniDisc your compressed audio got compressed again. Obviously I discovered Cool Edit and recorded / edited on PC once I had the hardware, then recorded onto MD to listen on the move.

The long play feature was a nice innovation from a capacity point of view but only doubled or quadrupled the time requirements. I experienced deep joy initially at being able to hook up my MD to the optical out of my SoundBlaster Live and use the bundled MiniDisc centre to put a compilation together and leave it to record overnight. That deep joy ended when something went wrong and the transfer didn't take place.

Real time recording was probably the main limitation that killed the MD in the end. It was a smart product that was a pain to use. The idea of being to transfer audio data or files directly onto a minidisc via USB was a dream come true but it, too, was clumsy and I never bothered investing.

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Reply 36 of 129, by Lo Wang

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Scali wrote:

I think the Amiga is a special case because developers just *loved* that thing. I think they just loved making games on it, even though the PC market was larger.

If the favor bestowed upon a platform by software developers could be measured by the overall quality of it's game library, then the Amiga was hated bitterly and accursed of man.

"That if thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved" - Romans 10:9

Reply 37 of 129, by stuvize

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dexter311 wrote:
Kerr Avon wrote:

I wouldn't class the Dreamcast, Amiga, or any popular console or computer as a flop, really. As long has it has good games, and is still used by some people today, then even if it wasn't a massive success, it's not a flop. But machines that weren't too popular, and didn't sell too well, yes they were flops.

The Dreamcast sold so poorly, that Sega was forced to close its hardware division. That's a complete flop in my eyes.

There was a lot of factors that made the Dreamcast fail like the lawsuit with 3DFX. This is what I find most fascinating about the DC that Sega got access to 3DFX technology and produced quite a few working prototype DC motherboards with 3DFX GPUs on them. The motherboards are codenamed Blackbelt and failed to go into mass production because Sega claims they could not get the desired performance out of the 3DFX chip and ultimately chose NEC to produce the GPU in the DC and codenamed the boards Katana. If the Blackbelt hadn't flopped things most certainly would have turned out differently for 3DFX and Sega.

Reply 38 of 129, by Scali

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Lo Wang wrote:

If the favor bestowed upon a platform by software developers could be measured by the overall quality of it's game library, then the Amiga was hated bitterly and accursed of man.

That's not what I said though.
*Some* games were truly made because of the love of Amiga.
Many games were also poor Atari ST or PC ports (apparently they went where the money was).
As I said above: "As a result, a lot of early Amiga games were poor Atari ST ports and/or 'lowest common denominator' products. So a lot of games on Amiga weren't quite as good as they could and should have been."

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Reply 39 of 129, by mr_bigmouth_502

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realnc wrote:
Scali wrote:

The Commodore Amiga is one.

That didn't flop. It was a huge success and dominated the computer gaming market for years.

What was a flop was the Amiga CD32. I bought one back then. Oh boy, the biggest waste of money still until this day.

It didn't flop in Europe, but it DID flop in North America.