During my teenage years in what is today a post-Soviet country -- to put it in apt context -- I was briefly an absolutely ecstatic owner of a Gravis Ultrasound (Classic, I believe) card. I probably had spent my _annual_ extra income on that card. My period of ecstasy -- playing Epic Pinball, Doom and Second Reality by Future Crew etc -- enjoying the then insane sound quality (funny how that works when your comparison is Sound Blaster's MIDI and the "PC squeaker") lasted only a few months because the card fried a capacitor or something like that, and that was it. That was decades ago and I still think about it not unlike a friend I left behind that I can no longer reach back to, to be perfectly honest. I had the dead-weight on my shelf, that's the last I remember. I was young and probably didn't even think of handing it to an electronics shop for a relatively cheap repair -- a fried capacitor or loose PCB connection is not a fried custom processor, I imagine.

Anyway, good memories, even in the tragedy. I can relate to people who resurrect GUS.

Since others mention similar failings of their card, I remember I too had it installed horisontally in a (Chinese/Taiwanese) mini-tower, it definitely wasn't a desktop chassis, much less an IBM PC. I guess gravity strained it to a breaking point.