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Comment by jzwinck | Hacker News Reader

Sound cards too. The Hercules website still proudly shows all their boxes from back when sound cards were popular for gaming and more: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-soundcards-en/

Several models don't even have pictures of the card, but every one of them shows the crazy box.

They also still list all their old GPUs. Compare the wild boxes at the top with the TV tuner boxes at the bottom: https://support.hercules.com/en/cat-videocards-en/

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Just the mention of pieces of hardware we don't really need anymore (sound cards, modems, etc) triggers a flood of nostalgia. I used to spend DAYs poring over PC part catalogues dreaming of my ideal rig. And brands like Hercules, Creative, Matrox all trigger the same feelings.

Crazy contrast to me having spent the past weekend wondering if cloud gaming services like Geforce Now are matured enough that I can fully move to a thin client - fat server setup for the little bit of gaming I still do.

The technology works, but the business model doesn't, so there's the eternal risk that it might get shut down at short notice with no way to export your saves.

Yeah, that's definitely a worry. Also, the fact that you're dependent on them for adding support for future games, and that (like any cloud service) it might not be available right when you want it.

Yeah that's the issue - nobody wants to just rent you a gaming PC in the cloud, they all want a cut of game sales/licensing. But if someone were to do it, the technology is absolutely there.

You don't even need to create any internal tech - Steam Remote Play already has everything you need, and I successfully used it to play Battlefield from an AWS GPU instance (was even good enough for multiplayer).

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