Post the very best in obsolete and failed technology

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ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

I'm pretty sure the Dreamcast and its VMU has already been mentioned in this thread but did you there was to be a VMU based MP3 player?

http://www.ign.com/images/articles/tgs-2000-first-look-at-dreamcast-mp3-player-77299/149691

It was displayed at the 2000 Tokyo Game Show and so far as I know it was never released. It would not have been much compared to today's feature rich MP3 players and phones but back in the day it would have been totally awesome. It would have been pretty cool to plug this thing into your DC controller and play music through the Dreamcast. Perhaps it would have been able to interact with this other piece of ill-fated technology that was shown off at the same expo:

http://the-dreamcast-junkyard.blogspot.com/2007/10/dreamcast-zip-drive.html

The Dreamcast zip drive. Back when hard drives and internal storage devices were not standard on video game consoles it would have offered way more storage space then your average memory card but I guess it suffered the same fate as Nintendo's equally ill-fated 64DD and was never released.

Also anyone else remember how Nintendo's Gamecube was supposed to have an SD card adapter? Whatever happened to that?

# ¿ Sep 17, 2012 21:13

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:54

ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

Killer robot posted:

Old style PC upgrades!

First, there were math coprocessors. Old CPUs didn't come with any FPU capability, just integer, so math-heavy stuff had to be emulated and was very slow, and motherboards had an extra slot for a FPU sold separately. For example, on the original IBM PCs with 8086 or 8088 CPUs, adding an 8087 FPU would be a fairly significant extra expense, but could make the computer crunch spreadsheets five times as fast as the vanilla model. There were similar for the 286 and 386, but then the 486 is where it got weird:

The 486 had a FPU built in, but a a big batch of them early on had an error where it didn't work. So Intel relabeled them as the "486 SX" which didn't have a FPU, sold them cheaper, and put a socket on the motherboard for a "487 coprocessor." The 487? It was a regular 486DX chip with slightly different pinout, which simply replaced the existing CPU entirely. It worked so well, Intel started deliberately making FPU-crippled chips to sell as 486 SX processors, then turned around to sell the same people a real 486 later.

Then there was this one:

If you had a 386 system, you could plug this one in. It doubled your CPU frequency, added 486 instruction features, and even added a bit of on-chip cache like a 486. It had no math coprocessor though, and wasn't quite as fast as the real thing, but in a day when a midrange computer still cost $2000+ it was a pretty sweet deal. I have one of these sitting around somewhere. Related products were the Intel-made Pentium Overdrive for 486 motherboards, and assorted Cyrix and AMD products meant to give Pentium-level performance on 486 boards or Pentium II performance on Pentium boards. All with their own limitations, but great in those days of expensive computing.

Related, from the 486-Pentium era there were COASt modules, which literally meant "Cache On A Stick." At the time you'd have a tiny but fast L1 cache on the CPU and a larger, slower L2 cache on the board. COASt had that L2 on a stick like RAM, so you could buy a motherboard with none to save money then upgrade to 256k or 512k cache later. Eventually, manufacturers just started making L2 standard on boards before it finally got moved onto the CPU itself by the Pentium 2 era.

These things remind me of those "physics cards" from a few years back that never really took off.

# ¿ Sep 18, 2012 17:50

ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

I remember my dad bought one of the first generation HD-DVD players and the thing was like a computer, when you turned it on it took like two or three minutes to boot up

# ¿ Sep 21, 2012 01:18

ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

I remember the rewind button breaking on my cassette players a lot so to rewind I had to flip the cassette to the other side and fast forward, who else remembers doing this?

# ¿ Oct 3, 2012 20:56

ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

Prenton posted:

Ah, that reminds me.

Handheld joysticks

Including the Konix "gently caress you, leftie" Speedking

The Konix (again) "Set phasers to cramp" Navigator

And the Cheetah "apparently quite good, actually" Bug

I always find early joysticks like this and like the Atari 5200 controller interesting because it seems like no one quite knew what they were doing yet and ergonomics were not even a consideration yet. Like no one actually sat down and thought about how you would hold these drat things. You see weird things like buttons above the joystick, buttons on the side of the controller, telephone-style keypads, etc.

# ¿ Jul 24, 2013 16:46

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# ¿ Apr 28, 2024 01:54

ZALGO!: Dec 4, 2006; These are the end times. We've got to be prepared! ZALGO!

I bet most of you were unaware that Radio Shack released their own video game console, well more accurately their parent company Tandy released one under the Memorex brand which was owned by Tandy at the time.
I'm talking about the Memorex Video Information System, released in 1992 exclusively through Radio Shack. It was a CD based system produced around the time where lots of people were convinced that interactive FMV games were the future of gaming, a concept which would become outdated itself around the release of the Playstation a few years later. There's not much to say about it really, it had a 286 Intel processor and it's own custom version of Windows 3.1. The best way to describe it is imagine the Phillips CD-I but worse, if you can imagine such a thing. The games were basically what you'd expect from such a system; tons of edutainment titles, that Sherlock Holmes FMV game that seemed to have made its way to every CD-ROM device at the time, I think a golf game or too. It was a huge failure, due to the lack of decent games and the asking price of $699 (in 1992 dollars) certainly did not help. The rumor is that Radio Shack employees would say that the VIS actually stood for "Virtually Impossible to Sell". So it got relegated to the dustbin of video game history and it only sought out today by serious collectors for its relative obscurity. But for one moment yes, Radio Shack had its own video game console.

EDIT: Apparently there was a promo video released for it,and it's the most 90's thing you've ever seen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cayU_2iM07c

ZALGO! has a new favorite as of 15:34 on Nov 1, 2015

# ¿ Nov 1, 2015 15:17

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