Game Console ISA cards

[Cobra!]

There was a trend in the 1990s where consoles and multimedia platforms that were failing and took the PC expansion route as a last ditch attempt to get them to catch on. 3 consoles tried this and we know of 2 more that were in the works.

These cards had the consoles in the form of a ISA expansion card that essentially leeched power from the PC, used it's disc drive and either had included software to display on the PC, or had to be plugged into  a seperate display.

There was the 3DO blaster by 3DO and Creative Labs, which was a 3DO on a card for Windows 3.1 PCs. Not much to say here.

Phillips also attempted this with the CD-i/PC 2.0, but it's hard to find anything on this card other than it did exist, and there is one photo. (Said photo and most of the info here comes from a PCMag article here)



Last but definitely not least, there was the PC-FX GA, which went one step further and actually expanded (heh) the capabilities of the PC-FX and gave it 3D capabilities (the console itself was 2D only. In a generation where 3D was the focus).
You could also buy an official SDK for it to make your own games.
The 3D capabilities from the looks and sounds of it, were still not on par with Saturn and PS1 but perhaps more than 3DO and Jaguar.
I'm a sucker for early 3D jank, and homebrew, so this is right up my alley and I want one so bad!

This card had 2 variants: One for the PC-98, and one for DOS/V (Although apparently all variants of DOS could use it)

I would love to make a build with all 3 of these cards and make a hyper multisystem! (Someone was attempting the same thing on Vogons)

There were plans for a card for the Atari Jaguar and Sega announced a PCI card for playing Dreamcast games. Both were announced but quietly scrapped.

There was also a card Sega released called the "Diamond Edge 3D" which used Sega Saturn controllers and some Sega PC games made use of it to render quads on PC, but it wasn't a Sega Saturn on a card. Worth mentioning here, though.

Sonic X-treme was apparently developed on one of these and part of the reason it never released was because they realised it wasn't a Saturn on a card and had to essentially start from scratch on Saturn. Among other reasons.

Anyone here ever had one (or more?  ) of these cards? What do you think of these?