[armitron]

Not even close. PC Speaker vs Soundblaster is Hercules (monochrome) vs VGA. You could never go back, same as 3dfx.

GUS was better than sb pro/sb 16 but a lot of games didn't take advantage of it and once AWE32/64 arrived, GUS was dead in the water.

[mhd]

Going back to 2D was my sincerest wish back then, when they tried shoehorning everything into 3D. There was no reason back then for having e.g. jump and runs, adventures or RTS games in 3D. It worked fine enough for FPS, which is why that genre dominated so much back then.

And yeah, I knew that the GUS only enjoyed a very short-lived popularity, just like Voodoo cards when the Geforces etc. showed up. Okay, maybe the popularity at its height wasn't quite equal, but the next 3D fads are quite a few steps down (e.g. PowerVR or the first Matroxes).