Now for the important stuff...
I started in computers back in 1993, I think. I'd just started university so I don't remember a whole lot. :-)
Back then e-mail was a PRIVILEGE. I remember having to enter SMTP%"Bob@dings.com" or something similar.. Cut and paste? HA! Attachments? Only when they're UUencoded! I didn't understand what that meant then and pretty much don't care now. However, I digress.

My first computer had Windows 95 on it. I can remember killing it at LEAST three times. It was "hot" with 75 Mhz Pentium and 8 MB RAM!

(Enter knights: "Get on with it!")

When I moved to Germany I couldn't keep up my usual hobby of fixing cars because of the taxes and gasoline (Americans don't say petrol) prices and there was my second computer.. an Acer Aspire... Cracked the case one day to add RAM and the rest is history.

Since then I've been pretty active in computers, especially games. I usually play 3D sims of the "big robot" or mecha genre, like Mechwarrior 1,2 and 3 and Heavy Gear. One game I feel people overlook is Starsiege, I think it makes up for some of the things the other games don't have. I also like racing, being from near Detroit, and play Need for Speed IISE, III and High Stakes. Although I haven't had time to play them lately. I wanted to be a fighter pilot at one time so I play flight sims, like Jane's Fighter Anthology, and EF2000. Then there are the great mixes of driving and shooting.... the Interstate series from Activision.

So you play games. The Voodoo 3000 is fine for games and you said to yourself a decoder card is not a bad idea.   Why the multimedia stuff?
Why the 3500:
It was the only card readily available at the time. I had had a Mystique 220 + Voodoo 1 combo until then and I killed it one day. Well I didn't kill it, Microsoft did with DirectX 7.0. Half my games didn't work and I was hungry for more then 640X480 resolution. Another reason, as you know is that the United States uses the NTSC standard for television. In Europe it's PAL. I could use the video capture to convert (I thought, haven't figured it out 100% yet) NTSC tapes to a file, then play it back and record it PAL. The other way around I can capture from PAL, burn to CD send the CD to the States where someone can either play it on the PC or TV-out to a VCR.  Works great! I don't have kids but when I do I can see my parents getting disgustingly cute videos on CD. The whole multimedia thing interested me anyway. So it came down to this:

• Needed a card because the others were broke.
• Needed Glide so most games I already had work
• Wanted TV-out for the above reasons
• Wanted TV-in for the above reasons
• DVD was also a consideration
• Packaged software seemed good at the time

My current system:
Win 95C (Win 98 is just too fat and slow) on a
Western Digital UDMA 33 HDD, 3.1 GB, 5400 RPM, formatted in 2 partitions with FAT16
Quantum Atlas 7400 4.3 GB FastSCSI drive (mostly for writing to CDs and playing multimedia) FAT32
Quantum Atlas II 10,000 RPM UW SCSI FAT32 for video capture and games. :-)
FastSCSI Adaptec 2940 (can't afford a UW controller yet) If you never want to have problems with SCSI, get Adaptec, expensive, but worth it.
Toshiba 1201 SCSI DVD drive. 5 X (OK 4.8 but the SCSI makes up for it)
TEAC 56s CD writer
AMD K6-2+ 500 Mhz (yes +) clocked to 550 Mhz)
128 MB PC 100 RAM
NMC VMX board (EpoX copy with MVP3 chipset)
External ZIP drive.
Voodoo 3500 (duh) No real tuning used, usually.

Get me back the important stuff: Watching DVDs!