Most expensive, but utterly useless piece of Amiga hardware you bought

[van_dammesque]

For me nothing directly amiga related, but when I towered up my a1200 with accel, hdd, cd-rom etc..I had pondered to do this instead of going the PC route, I planned on getting a colour inkjet printer.
It was an HP one (came with a good review from an issue of amiga format) and it was hardly used and learned quite quickly the BS of 'photo realistic prints' and how the ink didn't last nor was cheap! This thing cost £140 irc. BUT unlike the PC's at the time I had to also stump up £50, yes fifty quid (!!), for turbo print software in order for it to work, grrr.

Costly lesson but probably has saved me in the long run as I only ever had laser printers ever since.

However, not expensive (£7) but certainly UTTERLY USELESS was a FDD fascia plate I bought from eyetech (!?) (ADPT-DF0-FP was its code), its job was to allow you add a face plate and use your amiga's internal floppy in your tower. Now I expected something to match my external floppies that were now towered. Nope it was a piece of sheet metal, with a slot and bent and painted white. Useless, the slot didn't align with the disk drive and didn't even fit into the 3.5 inch bay, if it did it wouldn't clip in as I said it was a plain piece of metal. Sorry for the rant but that really soured my image of eyetech and never bought anything from them again!

EDIT: I knocked this up to show what it looked like, did anyone else see this?


2nd EDIT: and yes it didn't come with a cutout for the button to eject the floppy!

[Thorham]

Originally Posted by stx2199

but in reality it always was and still is a waste of money

Perhaps, but was it useless?

[van_dammesque]

Originally Posted by StevenJGore

Definitely my CD32 FMV card!

Ouch! I recall Star Trek 6 was released and pushed as a great FMV film but the thought of changing CDs midway through the film put me right off the idea!

[malko]

I would say that my biggest "buy" regret was a tower for my A1200.

[stx2199]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Perhaps, but was it useless?

I don't think so, not really useless
but yes something overpriced

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by stx2199

I don't think so, not really useless
but yes something overpriced

Not useless at all, it was the best of that time.

It actually set the standard to consider whether a Mediator was worth it.

Which it was because a Mediator+Voodoo+SB128 was far better but not quite as good in some ways, like not including a flicker fixer.

PIV was designed as a PCI Bridge, had it actually flown off of shelves they were considering CPU expansions to sit on the PIV.

At the same time you had Phase V who were competing with their own RTG and bus expansion.

[xc8]

Originally Posted by van_dammesque

EDIT: I knocked this up to show what it looked like, did anyone else see this?


2nd EDIT: and yes it didn't come with a cutout for the button to eject the floppy!

more looks like for slotted optical/MO drives, on 3.5" form maybe for auto-eject FDDs like on SparcStations / Mac (they are usually SCSI)

[Pyromania]

@DDNI

Couldn't someone make a modern Re-Amiga Walker? Might be a fun project to explore. They could always make it look like an SGI O2!

[CCCP alert]

It was £70-80 for a Commodore 14mhz 68020 card for my A2000 I bought used, I wasn't sure if it was borked or just useless but bugger all except Workbench apps seamed to work on it.