ODDWARE: ReelMagic - The 1995 Full Motion Video Experience
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- Опубліковано 3 чер 2024
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The FMV craze of the early 1990s came to your PC with MPEG decoder cards, I check out one of the earliest - The ReelMagic MPEG Card and a few of the handful of games that were released for it.
ReelMagic DOS Box Fork: github.com/jrdennisoss/dosboxrm
My retro gaming podcast: theretrohour.com
My Twitter: / danwood_uk
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▬ Contents of this video ▬
00:00 - The Early 90s FMV Craze
02:50 - Introduction of MPEG
03:47 - Sigma Designs RealMagic Card
05:50 - Installing The RealMagic Card
06:50 - NordVPN Sponsor Segment
08:22 - ReelMagic MPEG Set Up
09:00 - ReelMagic Demo Disc
09:27 - MPEG VideoCDs
10:27 - Return To Zork
11:37 - Dragon's Lair
12:36 - Flash Traffic: City of Angels
13:30 - Man Enough
13:55 - Crime Patrol 2: Drug Wars
14:13 - Conclusion
15:54 - New FMV Games
Sources used in this video (with permission or under fair use):
Commodore 64 Advert: • Commodore 64 Advert
Bad Influence! Series 2 Episode 5: • Bad Influence! Series ...
Sigma Designs ReelMagic Adverts: archive.org/details/sigma-des...
ReelMagic Adverts: / 1483908757365088259
#retrogaming #fmv #oddware - Наука та технологія
The first MS Encarta tiny vids blew me away, it seemed like alien tech at the time
Encarta was the best thing 🙏
Encarta was my go-to source for book reports lol
Remember they had a really cool video on Soundgarden?
I just want this story to be told.... my daughter is in her 20s now. She is so used to modern electronics, she once stepped outside with her friends and straight out said" Oh wow, the clouds look sooooooo 3D". The complete opposite of how I reacted to the video on a computer. Thanks for your time 🙏. I just thought that was funny. Maybe it's just me.
I had totally forgotten Encarta. Had '95 lol
mine was the 1995 Weezer video showing off MPEG by playing Buddy Holly in Windows. It was a life changing moment.
I could be wrong, but wasn't there both an AVI and MPEG version of those videos? the MPEG one had better video quality, but the AVI had better sound.
I'm not sure if this was from the Windows CD or maybe one of those ATI Mach 64 cards that came out with MPEG chip.
I loved the Sierra FMV adventures back in the day like Gabriel Knight 2 and Phantasmagoria.
A nice follow-up would be the next-gen MPEG2 cards like the Creative DxR3, had one back in the day with a p200mmx.
It had a very nice upscaler (to 1600x1200) with some hw postprocessing and great output quality to old CRT TVs. I was blown away watching our first DVDs with that thing :)
I always loved the fmv era. Great time to be a gamer and have the nostalgia to look back on.
Oh i dunno about the games the glut of FMV games made me wanna puke.
I remember being so disappointed in my mega CD - Sonic CD was amazing, but everything else I had was terrible and focused on the FMV instead of gameplay
@@nuttyjawa Ya companies ran with that FMV on the Sega CD i swear if Sega didnt allow that glut of FMV they might still be making consoles today. Well that and if they didnt release 32x
@@legbert123 what’s hilarious to me is for as much as gamers now make fun of fmv, you spend more time with your controller on the couch watching cutscenes in modern games than you did with the likes of sewer shark which successfully blended fmv with the gameplay. The number of QT events in games now too make Dragon’s Lair blush. I don’t need a constant pop up telling me to push triangle to toss a guy through a window. The Call of Duty franchise is a glorified movie with the same endless scripted events.
@@mikeg2491 Who is this you. I dont tend to play games with much QT and I know nothing of The call of Duty series. I like a lil narrative to punctuate 85% of the gameplay loop. I do know that I was so pissed off when I bought my $400 Sega Cd in the day with 3 games, SS and Night Trap were the first 2 I played. SS Did not successfully blend fmv with the gameplay.
The FMW was horrible and The cursor was hella laggy. Oh well Night trap was worth the laughs I guess, and Eternal Champions Cd was was meh but not total shit. Fuck the Sega CD
Thanks so much for uploading. This was a super informative and interesting. Looks like tons of effort was involved.
I remember all of this. Love it! Please keep these up.
Very informative and interesting video Dan. Great work!
The first ever video I saw on a computer was in 1996, on a 100 MHz 486DX4. It was the music video for Edie Brickell's Good Times, bundled on the Windows 95 CD. It was the 15fps AVI version, not the 30fps MPEG one, that was only included on the Windows 95 OSR2 CD, IIRC.
Nostalgia Nerd also mentioned this video in his Windows 95 Weezer episode. ua-cam.com/video/FOl94fO78nk/v-deo.html
First time I saw a video on a 286 computer in that tiny little square and still, my mind was blown. I loved the FMV era. Bought many games and still have them, as well as many dedicated dos boxes. Goddamn nostalgia!
Great video, Dan
Great video dan. I was like u even though the first fmv I seen was terrible quality it didn't matter as we knew it was just the beginning
The quality just kept getting better and better , what a great time to be a gamer
Funny, the Matrox Mystique handled MPEG-1 pretty well by itself. Better than most decoders of the time really.
Great vid Dan
REEL Magic really pushed the visuals.! Awesome upload Dan!
You're absolutely right about Video CDs (also referred to as VCDs) taking off in the Middle East. In fact, my uncle would give me VCDs whenever I would visit Egypt on vacation during the summer (my parents are originally Egyptian). They were also commonly found inside of the corner stores owned by Arabs here in the West during that time period. My hypothesis for why it took off there is because of how easy they were to make and how economical they were compared to DVDs during that time. Most people in the Middle East probably didn't have dedicated DVD players or DVD drives in their computers in the Early 2000s. Thus, it made sense to make use of existing technology.
Great video as always Dan. Hope you’re doing well mate.
*Great video as always, Dan! Man I miss the good old days! I was the same! I remember the PC int he school library had I think it was encarta 95 and had amazing pictures and video clips! I was just amazed!* 💪👍💻
I had the special mpeg version that had 4x larger vid clips
And look no further than when in 1997, mighty IBM released the ThinkPad 770 notebook-series.
The first with true DVD-playback (Full Resolution PAL/NTSC from a swapable DVD-drive module) and plug-in hardware MPEG1/MPEG2-card called DEVA, with Composite/S-Video In/Out + Dolby Digital Ac3 and HiFi-Stereo In/Out on the notebook itself. Magnificent piece of engineering.
I remember borrowing the MPEG-enhanced version of _Horde_ from a friend and couldn't play it on our PC because it required a ReelMagic decoder card.
As for newer FMV game titles: Ashens made one here in UA-cam called "Who Stole My Sofa" which made use of the overlay captions feature. It can't be played anymore since Google removed the feature, but the video is still available in non-interactive form.
Thanks Dan. I remember my dad bringing one of these home, i think someone gave it to him as it became redundant fairly quickly. We had a matrox mystique in that pc too! Takes me back.
Thanks for a reminder on the emulator! I've been wanting to play these for a long time and now I know what I'll be streaming soon!
Being of a certain age (ahem) I fondly remember when the multimedia PC craze happened and how excited I was to get my first MPEG decoder card in my PC (in the days before this acceleration was baked-in to video cards). There was a local PC shop that offered a name-brand MPEG decoder card + DVD ROM drive for a better price than I could buy it for myself online, so I took it to them and they did the installation in about a day. I was blown away by the ability to watch broadcast quality video from DVDs and video CDs. I feel like that was a game-changing technological advancement that people take for granted today.
These are gems today even, apparently a rare version of under a killing moon exists that uses the card
One of the reasons VCDs became popular in some areas of the world is that they stood up to high heat and humidity *much* better than VHS. In a hot swampy area like SE Asia, VHS would basically rot on the shelf. So VCD won the format war. (Not to mention being considerably cheaper than VHS too.)
Wow, this is a blast from the past! I had a ReelMagic card when they first came out. It kind of struggled with the single speed Mitsumi I had at the time. I had to upgrade to a dual speed drive before it was watchable. Do you remember the follow up product when DVD hit? I got one of those Real Magic MPEG2 decoders around the time I had a Celeron I think.
The Hollywood Plus you mean? I had as part of a Sony DVD ROM kit which included Jumanji on DVD. I later bought the remote control add-on (IR receiver connected to a serial port) as well.
And an OEM version of the same card shipped with Creative Labs' DVD playback kit.
@@NumptyMcNumptyface Yes, that's the one (I think)! It was pretty cool being able to watch DVD on the PC =D A year or two later you didn't need that card lol.
I was given a Diamond Multimedia MPEG2 decoder + 1x DVD-ROM kit new in the box around 1999. The PCI card was a truly full length beast, like 1984 PC full length. Diamond introduced the kit in 1997 and promptly tried to ignore it ever existed thanks to the new Pentium III's demonstrated ability to not need a hardware MPEG2 decoder.
The decoder only worked with the included DVD player software, which was utter crap. It had no ability to maximize its window or go full screen. It could be manually resized, showing off the hardware's ability to resize the video. Why no other software could use it was because for some crazy reason Diamond decided to completely ignore DirectX, which could have been used to easily enable any other video software to use the card. Even worse, the drivers and player would only work properly in original Windows 95. Even installing the 95a update would break it! There never was any software update, just a download of exactly what came on the CD-ROM.
What it looked like was Diamond had started work on the thing just as soon as they got wind of DVD-ROM drives going to become available for PCs, and chose to operate completely disconnected from everything "on the outside", including updates to Windows. Then when 1997 rolled around and the new generation of CPUs obliterated the need for all their work, they shipped the crap they had in stock and washed their hands of the product. Dunno why they wouldn't have gone back to the coding dungeon to do DirectX drivers, they could have re-positioned it as an upgrade for older PCs without the sheer CPU grunt to software decode DVD MPEG2.
MPEG2 decoder cards from other companies did live on for a while with exactly that kind of marketing, and even for systems that could software decode DVD but only if that's the only thing they were doing. An MPEG2 card could enable a PC to play DVD in the foreground while you had it doing some other CPU intensive task in the background, like compressing a ripped DVD video to MPEG1 for burning a Super Video CD. Really shouldn't need to mention that the other MPEG2 card sellers provided DirectX compatible drivers, and they worked with newer versions of Windows.
I remember browsing through one of those MPC promotion CD-ROMs real early on with the 486DX2 I had.
No MPEG Encoder anywhere but it left an impression on me.
It was the PlayStation when I was really impressed because between levels, I got FMV cutscenes which in case of games like Tarzan often were movie cutscenes.
Pure gold.
I was at the World of Commodore trade show in Toronto back in 90 (or maybe 91?) and saw Great Valley Products (GVP) streaming the movie Snow White full screen on an Amiga to show how fast their SCSI controller was... by 96 I was working as a developer doing presentation software that relied on MPEG and we used RealMAGIC cards in our systems. I have a whole tub full of old cards somewhere! Lol. I also have a Panasonic CF41 486 notebook with the hardware MPEG pack that replaced the floppy drive. I think that machine was like 4 grand brand new, but when it played video it would blow minds! Those were fun days!
Comet! Lol! God that takes me back. I miss the 80s/90s, much more a time of mystery and awe in home computing and game consoles.
Remember seeing all of this along with working with ray tracing back in the late 80s and early 90s on my Amiga.
What a hit of nostalgia! I'd totally forgotten that _Have I Got News for You_ used to be funny.
7th Guest, Voyeur & Late Shift all in one video? Amazing!
What a great video, it reminds me very much of when I took my first dip into DVD playing. I couldn't afford a dedicated DVD player, they were new and very expensive. However, I could afford a Creative Labs DXR2. This was a 5x DVD drive (which I flashed to become region free!) and an MPEG2 decoder card. It also came with Wing Commander 4 and another game I can't remember, but all the video was full DVD MPEG2 quality.
This was my new DVD playing setup which was clunky but worked perfectly. It outputted to my 14 inch TV via an SVideo cable. I had a piece of software which fooled Creative's DVD playing software into which region I wanted to watch. It also adjusted the colour output somehow. My TV could show NTSC but in black and white, the software did something to make it colour. Finally, I bought an IR box that was connected by serial cable so I could use a spare remote to control the PC from the other side of my bedroom. What a home cinema setup! :-)
Shit... I had an inverter running to an old PC with a stripped down Windows `95 install in the trunk of my '86 Taurus playing these songs recorded in the new Franhoeffer Music Codec (MP3) from my 1GB Seagate drive and a 10Mbit NE2000 ethernet card cabled to an NEC laptop remoted in to the PC using WinMirror playing 1000s of songs using Sonique and an ISA SB-16. I should have patented the first iPod.
Dunno how I'm just discovering this channel now. Come on UA-cam algorithm, you know damn well I love this shit.
$449 back in the day for a PC addon card is a lot. Video cards cost less then 1/2 that price, but my how times have changed.
This brought back memories
Yes mate. Night trap and double switch remain stand out gaming experiences, even if they haven't aged well at. So cool at the time.
Here in the Netherlands where Philips also originates from, Video CD's where also a big thing. In the time before DVD, many record stores had a decent section with Video CD's (Movies) and also many music single CD's included a Music Video.
I remember this fondly, I still would love to find a Sigma ReelMagic card. All I can find on eBay is the later MPEG2 model. Thanks for covering this quirky product.
I have one of those boxed w all the extra software and booklets I did a video on it
I remember getting the CD32 FMV module, came with Microcosm and Star Trek VI
Microcosm was identical without the FMV module right?
Mid 90's seeing a BBC micro in the school library running some sort of first person google maps like VCD was my first WOW moment, yes OK the BBC was doing nothing but input, but being in control of something that would take google 20 odd years to bring to the market was mind blowing!
Great work Dan, keep the dream alive.
Sounds to me like the BBC Doomsday project?
@@mrtiff99 Yes that was it! Core memories.
@@dine9093 Yep, I was also blown away by it. I remember thinking it would be amazing to have something like that in the home some day, now i carry it around on device that fits in my pocket, mad!
I did a video on this a while back, I got one of the reelmagic cards completely sealed never touched, fascinating cards, I was able to stream the realmagic versions of flash traffic and return to zork live as well
I got Golden Melody branded version of the mpg2 variant marketed as dvd decoder. In the box there was RealMagic in it sticker.
I really wanted one of these after reading about them in PC Format Magazine. :-) ahh 90's nostalgia.. Niche product but very cool tech for its time.
Thank you! I'm excited to try out Return to Zork. Can the mt-32 or SC (emulators) be used with this fork? In the dosbox .conf, I've tried changing "midiconfig=" to 1 and 2, and changed the sound device in the RTZ install to mt-32, but i'm still getting the regular basic music.
Success! not sure why but the mt-32 emulation is working now with midiconfig=1 in .conf. And in the RTZ setup, changing audio devices to Soundblaster 16 for sound effects and mt-32 for music. Excellent! I'm REALLY excited now for a whole new RTZ experience! Thank you for making the video!
Thanks a bunch for this. When I was a kid, I always wanted to get a Sigma card just for Flash Traffic (back then not knowing how poor the game actually is). Never got one, it's nice to see it in action here.
I actually found that game was pretty good, more paths to lose or win than I expected, I did a full playthrough of it
I was intrigued by the ReelMagic card with Return to Zork back in the day! I was surprised it was independent of the processor, so would run on a 386 or above! I've been wondering how to emulate it, but you've mentioned it can be done in DOSBox.
Yeah I remember watching a made for TV series called killernet which was featured a full blown mpeg card but I really liked phantasmagoria and burncycle which were awesome at the time.
Regarding the recent FMV revival, the 2015 _Need for Speed_ reboot counts as one, especially when it made novel use of the format by seamessly blending in live-action footage with real time rendered models of cars in certain cutscenes.
I got the movie "A Hard Days Night" on a CD from a friend and it run in a tiny Window. But it was so great a full movie on my PC.
Weezer on the Win95 CD was about the pinnacle of raw PC video at the time. The RealMagic bumped it up to quality rivaling or even exceeding VHS and this was quite remarkable at the time as most machines couldn't even play video. I had a VL-Bus Cirrus Logic card that had hardware acceleration for both Windows 3.1 and MPEG video. Talk about high tech! About '96 I got a Pentium-66 with 32MB RAM and I recall the CPU pegging around 90% just to play an MP3 on Windows '95 with Winamp 1.5 and nothing else open.
An interesting video, it did not cross my mind at the time, and feels quaint now.
Great video :)
I was always amazed with the fact that I could digitise a minute or so of music on my Atari ST. I knew the future of music was on computers.
I have one of the original ISA cards stored away some place in the attic.
I was kind of lucky (if you can call it that), I worked for a local software/hardware computer retailer so I was able to purchase this at cost, but still didn't get much use :(
We bought a Packard Bell with a 90MHz Pentium in 1995 or so, and it came with a 10GB hard drive. About 20% of that space was taken up by an uncompressed AVI of Weezer's "Buddy Holly" music video, which actually played fast enough to be comparable to SDTV signals of the time. Coming from a 386, it totally blew me away, even if I had to delete it to fit games on it after I'd owned it a half year or so.
I also had a Packard Bell PC from the same time. The Weezer music video was included on the Windows 95 CD-ROM and did certainly did not consume 2GB of space. In fact there were also other videos like a movie trailer, Edie Brickell music video, and a few Win95 promos.
Hi Dan,
I remember I got the CDTV when it came out and I got the game psyco I think it was called. I felt I was playing a movie! So I can relate to your experience, it felt like it was the future!!!
I wish I kept my CDTV ☹️
It wouldn't be a retro gaming video from a UK UA-camr if there wasn't at least one mention of Commodore and Sega, LOL.
I think my best FMV memory was playing Sherlock Holmes - Consulting Detective on my Amiga CD32. I would love it if we could port some of the newer FMV games to the CD32 now that we have some wonderful CDXL tools like AGABlaster. There are a few FMV games that are playable on UA-cam for example which could work.
Interesting stuff.
I still have my Creative Labs DXR3 which is a rebranded Sigma Designs Hollywood+ in fact you can use the same drivers on windows!. The biggest mistake both companies did at the time, is that they didn't put 10% more effort to make them true video accelerators for video editing, something that Fast and Miro did. I have a large collection of hardware based video accelerators from the '90s and they all work on my retro machines!
I had a Macintosh Power PC in the 90s and remember being wowed by the demo quicktime FMV movies. The Quicktime VR movies were even more impressive to me, like being able to wander around a Japanese Zen Garden in any direction. MS Encarta had some world tour movies which were kinda similar.
I don’t remember the zen garden what was this from
If I remember right, the DVD version of Tex Murphy Overseer worked on my Hollywood Plus.
First time I remember seeing fmv was with Acorn Replay running on RISC OS. It was like dark magic.
I have to say this was indeed a big deal, for me it was Civ 2. Those wonder cutscenes have just always stuck with me.
I had all this stuff and all the Amigas with all the accessories, was expensive back then too.
To think I threw it all in the bin 20 years ago, as I had to much pc and electronic stuff lying about taking up too much room.
These days the stuff I chucked away would be worth a few dollars.
I still remember being blown away by the very bad FMV intro of Microcosm on the CD32 😀
It's funny that FMV was so impressive...when we would watch TV, VHS, or go to the movies and see something a million times better looking.
I bought one of these in the ninties. Unlike Amiga hardware, it came with no usefull tools to allow you to program or play around with it. I was disappointed, it was expensive and I returned it to the store for my money back.
Later I bought a mpeg 1 video capture card that would capture and playback mpeg1 on the TV. I used it like a DVR before they existed. I did a lot of video editing with software from Miro...i think that was the name, later it changed to Ulead.
Thanks for the memories!
I had an original Hauppage WintV PCI I used to hook up a camcorder and video chat on CUSeeMe and Netmeeting at 5FPS over dialup. It was the future, man.
I wished I had this or any other mpeg decoder card on my Packard bell legend back in 1994. I'm pretty sure PCEM doesn't have a emulated mpeg decoder card.
At that time...my friend had a Pentium MMX 166Mhz and a Ati Mach64. That did let us watch movies too! :D
I bought this mpeg card in the summer of 1995.
My brother and I where really stunned…
Speaking of Pentiums, my work's Audix Voicemail system just got upgraded last year from a Pentium 133 to a Pentium III 500 Mhz. The motherboard died on the old system, so they replaced it with a new one. I can hardly contemplate such speeds. Five HUNDRED megahertz. Nuts.
500? That's a lot. I was using Celeron 333 MHz.
I'd like to see you using DOSBox with ReelMagic: emulation only, no hardware, mentioning glitches.
Me in 1995: that video is too small. Me in 2022: never stops watching tiny videos on cell phone.
I had a ReelMagic VGA and sound card minus all the video and SCSI bits. SCSI? Yup, they mashed together a MediaVision Pro Audio Spectrum 16 with a VGA card, with the regular PAS 16's Trantor SCSI controller.
Edit: 5:42 That card, minus the video and SCSI, is what I had.
Then they made a version that was only populated with the PAS 16 parts. Why? Most likely for use with the full-up card because the PAS 16 was designed to be able to use two of them together for double the pleasure, double the fun - or double the number of playback voices or something.
I never had the full version of the card but I did have a SoundBlaster and was able to set them both up and have all my DOS games able to automatically use whichever was the best sound they supported, and Windows 3.11 (the OEM only release which could run on a 286, not Windows For Workgroups 3.11) used the PAS 16. I also had 12 megs of RAM in it, 512K in DIP chips on the mainboard and the rest on three ISA cards from Micron - divided between XMS and EMS because I had some old DOS stuff that only worked with genuine hardware EMS.
A note about the SCSI most PAS 16 cards had. It had no BIOS so it wasn't bootable but it was an otherwise normal SCSI controller, able to connect several devices so a CD-ROM, flatbed scanner, hard drive etc could all be daisy chained. The caveat was it was SLOW. Just fast enough for a 4x CD-ROM drive's maximum read speed.
Id love to get one of these cards to mess around with but getting the games to go along with it is the tough part.
I can't believe it, I remember our first computer used this.
Wales interactive keeping the fmv dream alive
awesome video
play one of the movie cds with "quickview pro" dos movie player?
No mention of Harvester?? That FMV game aged like fine wine.
Wow!!! Good Time And Best Time..
Smallville once had VCD releases and contained one episode per disc.
If they carried on with this format it'd span over 200 discs 🤯
I have this first pc-dvd kit from Creative with a very large mpeg card and a dvd 1x drive, The large chip and drivers indicate matsushita hardware. I never have found any info on that one and seems very rare. Anyone has some information?
Some of the original developers of hardware decoding were Visual Circuits and MediaSonic. Maybe start there. Wouldn't be surprised if chips were related as SB did not develop their own chips at the time. There were 3 or 4 proprietary CD drive standards before ATAPI/IDE and Creative Labs had their "own" which I seem to recall being a Philips/JVC protocol with a different pinout but the same connector that could be defeated with a specially crimped cable but don't quote me on that.
Had one of these and several Philips cdi movies,
My most favorite FMV game?
X-Files The Game
Also 7th Guest and 11th Hour are both epic.
Those are gems I also suggest quantum gate
Back in the 90s I predicted that the computer, the TV and the phone would become a single device. I didn't predict the mobile aspect of my vision but rather a large console like machine in every person's home that would be a hub for data, entertainment and information exchange. I just didnt realize that Apple would put all of that in a handheld device.
Now in today's world I am watching UA-cam videos in my livingroom on a 60 inch flatscreen TV, almost like what I predicted just the phone is still separate.
The time we used to download over a few days to get a film and using freeserve etc
9:09 made it to market - The Horde (3do/saturn/pc). 3do version was the worst with non-standad framerate of 12 and 15
I remember tht half time clip, NBA JAM
I'll never forget watching the Windows 3.1 tutorial video
Finally, computers were able to keep up with a TV and a VCR.
comet in the late 80-mid 90s - wonderful childhood memories
Damn, do I miss the frigging 90s 🙁
I remember lusting after owning one of these in the 90s.
I paid about $AU1500 for one of these when it was 1st released. Besides the very limited software library that i owned plus the 2-3 CD-I titles i thought it was the best thing ever!
My very first jaw dropping game console experience on Amiga CD32, was the alien breed tower assault intro:
ua-cam.com/video/dwuL4IGbvKc/v-deo.html
...and the Microcosm intro:
ua-cam.com/video/bcotsaqzGDk/v-deo.html
I bought a video grab card or something they called it?? It could play mpeg video full screen. I bought it for i think 15 dollar or something on a computer market. It had a free MPEG CD with David Bowie songs. I'm not sure.. It was fun. It worked. Thought not that much of it actually but it was a break trough in technology.
NordVPN is great but if you connect to anything for work that uses Microsoft Azure for logins while you're connected to a VPN server in another country it can cause your Azure login to look suspicious. Don't connect to anything that uses Azure while you're connected to VPN. You may find yourself locked out. Good video. It reminds me of just how much video on computers sucked in the 90s.
No one in their right mind would of payed half the price of a PC just for a single add on card, no wonder they failed
I had one of those on a Pentium 60mhz 16mb of ram never really noticed much difference with it or without it.