Wasn't sure if this should go in /maho/ or here. Going to post it here because it's mostly vidya related.
There was tons of cool hardware being released when I was a child that I lusted after and only got to experience through magazine reviews and sometimes in person with a demo model. Pioneer Laseractive was like the holy grail of consoles and I wanted it so badly. But it sold for nearly $1k in early 90s USD and I knew I'd never be able to afford one. Later on in life I tried to snag one off the collector's market before retro gaming stuff got ridiculous but they were impossible to find. I still haven't seen one in person since it was released initially and they had a demo version behind glass at a local mall.
This thing was so cool. It's a Laser Disc player that came with multiple things called "PACs". You could hook up the PAC to play Genesis/Megadrive and TurboGrafx-16 games. More PACs were supposed to be announced and there were many rumors that it would get a SNES/NES PAC eventually. Along with support for some other disc stuff that was coming out around that time like the 3DO.
The one I got to play on had the Genesis PAC. It would play both cartridges and SegaCD games. They didn't have a game like this at the time but it was supposed to be able to play SegaCD games off LD-ROMs. So the games would be able to take advantage of the better video available on Laser Discs as opposed to the SegaCD's horrible overly compressed low definition/color pallet videos. Never got to play an LD-ROM game. But back then it seemed like the ultimate solution to the CD game problem they were having with the SegaCD at the time. Would have been so cool if someone made an RPG to take advantage of the increased storage space, improved video and audio.
They shipped a PAC to interface with a standard DOS computer. Lots of people were excited about that because it would allow this to function as a cheap dev kit for consoles. But again I've never seen one in person. The PACs were more expensive than the actual consoles. Most of them were $600 each.
I always wondered if there was some rich guy out there that managed to buy the system+all of the PACs then quickly got bored with it so the console say collecting dust unused. Anyway, at the time this was like the ultimate gaming experience money could buy. I spent many hours writing and sending in letters to gaming magazines back then trying to win it in a contest. They ran this contest fo
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