Can a 486 Play MP3 Music In Good Quality?
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- Опубликовано: 24 июл 2024
- In this video we will find yout what the minimum x86 CPU requirements are to decode mp3 music with atleast 128kbps/stereo/44kHz. All tests are done under dos with following hardware:
Asus PVI-486SP3 Mainboard
CPUs:
Intel 486DX33
Intel 486DX2-66
AMD 486 DX2-80
Intel 486DX4-100
Intel Pentium Overdrive 83
The dos audioplayer which is used in this video is called: MPX
mpxplay.sourceforge.net/
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Music used in the video from RUclips Audio Library: Ocean View - Patrick Patrikios
Source of pictures and information:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3 
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The problem here is the ton of animation the player produces while playing the music file. Back when Fraunhofer published the format specs, I wrote a DOS player without any display gimmicks and it played a 128k stereo mp3 on a 286 at 12 MHz at 99% realtime. If I had a 16MHz version of that CPU back at that time, it would have worked. (to be fair, I've spent several weeks optimising the decoder assembly routines to scrape out every last CPU cycle.. it definitely was a project born from stubbornness and a desire to prove it can be done, and not the desire to produce a viable player application...)
I agree, testing software emulation on a multi-purpose CPU always means testing both the soft- and hardware. The whole video is quite disappointing.
There've been successful efforts to decode MP3s in real time on C64s (without additional hardware of course - there's the mp3@c64 which is basically a tacked on standalone MP3 player) - albeit at quite low quality. Never the less an incredible proof of concept that a 1MHz 8Bit CPU can pull it off.
@@1337Shockwav3 I'm old enough to remember speech on the C64. IT would blank the screen to save a few processor cycles.
286 cpu can't decode in realtime even 8kHz mono mp3 (not to mention it's 16 bit cpu and most mp3 decoders are 32 bit programs)
Yeah, those spectra are basically FFT transforms, unless they use the mp3 coefficients, but I'm guessing no...
This shows how powerful dedicated hardware can be for specific tasks.
Just like bitcoin miner.
well there was no equivalent at the time 486 dx was common
Nowadays is not needed for audio, modern CPUs are so ridiculously powerful that they can handle DAWs with very, very low latencies.
I'm using an almost 10 year old i7 and producing music with real time emulations of analog synthesizers, meanwhile a 486 can't even decode an mp3 very well. It's said that modern CPU power killed sound cards and other stuff.
@@saricubra2867 There are still external processors for audio. That's called DSP, one of them is inside Universal Audio Apollo series.
@@RinaldoJonathan Yes, but nowhere near as powerful as a modern CPU with the DAC.
Edit: The Universal Audio Apollo is an external DAC or amp, all the audio processing, encoding and other stuff is still done by the CPU. Nowadays, the best combination for music production is the best CPU you can buy with an external DAC and very high quality speakers, headphones. But on board DACs are also very good nowadays.
I've discovered your channel like 4 hours ago and I've watched like 25% of your videos they're so cool 😎
Thank you!
They really are. I never had the opportunity to own such interesting hardware back then so watching his videos is awesome. I love old tech stuff.
I discovered buddy the other day and have been enjoying his content as well :)
Same here, I have been binge watching all of the videos from this channel since last week.
Me too. So relatable, around the 2000s I often went to a known computer store dump to find exactly these parts thrown away and as I was at school and had not much money so seeing this again brings back memory. Challenge Number 1 was to find 30-pin SIMMs with more than 1 MB.
EEVblog is right ; this channel doesn't get enough love!
I imagine that this channel is going to really take off over the coming months
Thank you. I did not expect that. This vintage computer things are just my real passion and thought to make some videos. But I am happy that there are so many out there who like to watch my content. 🙂
Not worry, this channel will suddenly skyrocket when RUclips starts promoting it. Not that long anymore. Just be glad you're one of the first 10k subs
Very nice video, I've overclocked my dx4 to 120 to be able to listen to mp3s in windows 3.1
Didn't know there was an optimized for app for this, will find it and try it out
@@CPUGalaxy it's the passion that people like us love, you're like the bigclive of CPUs
I remember having a 150mhz Pentium, 50mhz bus, and it could play MP3s in Windows 95 with Winamp but I could not do anything else while it was playing.
150 mhz Pentium had 60 Mhz Bus. It was 2.5x 60 Mhz. (luckily). Almost 100% of time, it could be overclocked to 66x2.5, so regular 166 Mhz Pentium. But was of course cheaper. Not many people knew about overclocking, usually only tech nerds, in it's time, but those who knew it, could spare a little $50 dollars. :)
@@warrax111 Yes, you're right, my bad, I was thinking of my first Pentium 75. I had a really cheap PC Chips motherboard, I could never get it stable at 166mhz. Years later I used that CPU on a different motherboard and it was happy at 166 and I got it to boot at 180mhz but wasn't stable. Back then you could tell the difference in boot up times!
@@acorredorv yea, nice story. I had only 486 in its time of 1997, it was quite slow in 1997 already, but anyway, we upgraded then to 133 mhz pentium. I didnt know about overclocking, would try 166, but first time I've overclocked something was in 1999.
Btw that 150 Pentium I have right now in retro comp, that I've built last months, so I know it, cause I've played with it a lot. Overclocked it to 187 mhz (75x2.5). 200 Mhz is too much, would even boot. Mobo is QDI Titanium with TX chipset, so very fast setup. Would be very happy, if I have it in its time. Overclocking is though BIOS, one of the first motherboards with jumperless overclocking in BIOS. It is very stable and good motherboard, even Anandtech was happy with it www.anandtech.com/show/24/3
I can put there Pentium MMX, but I've kept Classic one, so I can underclock to 75 Mhz. Unfortunately, Pentium MMX doesn't use 1.5x multiplier, and interpretes it as 3.5x. So lowest possible is 50 FSB x 2 = 100 Mhz. So I've kept Pentium 150, so I can go to 75 mhz. It is my favourite speed for Pentium, cause it's so nostalgic. Slower than Pentium 66 usually. :)
But anyway, switching CPU is very easy, as I have ones with cooler attached to it, I don't have to take off coolers on them, just open Case and switch them like RAM. :)
That PC chips, I understand, what you mean. But luckily, if you could go at least stock speed stable, it was worth money, as they were very cheap. Made many people happy, but also, many people unhappy. :)
Good times, firing up Word and hoping Winamp will keep on playing your tunes. Then everything came to a stuttering halt when Word decided to auto spellcheck.
It sure did whip the llama's ass.
Very interesting to see how these CPUs handle mp3s. I wonder what other tests they could be put through. Maybe video playback?
Also There is One guy Who made Video Play on a 8088 IBM PC ruclips.net/video/MWdG413nNkI/видео.html With Tools and All To make it work.
I would love to see if with modern techniques there is some way to develop newer software targetting to get better performance for both video rendering and mp3 playing!
Maybe also developing a different encoding scheme altogether for both video and music, besides the new players.
Woah i never expected to find YOU here. Guess you have a fetish for thick german accents and old hardware xD
like honestly, how did you even find this Sal?
If you wonder how Sal is here , he ran minecraft in windows 98. So , he is an old hardware fanboy as well .
This is why mpeg decoder cards were a thing back in the day.
Uhh, AFAIK it was because of DVDs.
@@tripplefives1402 I beg to differ. DVD came along in 1996. Plenty of people were still using them then. And those cards weren't for just audio. From what I can find they were for video and audio, special games designed for them.
I remember it was not as much DVD but CD-ROMs with MPEG video on them. Mid-nineties, video was used more and more in games, but also in stuff like encyclopedias and magazines or demos, it was the way to enjoy your ‘multimedia PC’. So you could buy these MPEG decoder cards that could often be tacked on to a video card and were relatively cheap, and ensured you could run it without stuttering - especially on a lower end system.
MPEG decoders were mostly for FMV games on CDROM on 486 class machines. MPEG2 decoders were for anything pre-P3 that needed to play back DVD video.
@@timramich virtually no one had DVD until about 98
4:28 - DankPods being going "Now that's a nice nugget!"
I discovered your channel after this video being popped into my recommendation feeds. Look forward to sampling the rest of your content.
I remember having to make tweaks to get mp3s working back in the day in my buddies 486
Winamp was great in this:)
I remember i have to play some mp3 while playing some older games as pentium was too fast for those games
surely nothing liquid nitrogen couldnt fix.
Yes, i also tweak here and there to make it work. Also then pc freezed for other task. Haha
There was also an MS-DOS MP3 player I played with back in the day...MXPLAY I think it was called, I think...
As someone who was born in the late 90s, I didn't get to experience these 486 PCs, though I did experience the MP3 player craze in the early 2000s and late 90s. I find this fascinating. Watching a full desktop PC processor struggle with MP3 files is quite charming to me
DX4-100... My old, and never fulfilled wish... Good times...
Oh this is an awesome subject, super excited to find your channel!
Damn, now I want to break out all my old pc hardware and play around. Thank you for making videos of this hardware! People used to throw out computers with these chips left and right around 1999 - 2001 time period. Would just have to head out on trash day with a my bicycle and a wagon when I was a kid to see what I could find, even old S100 bus systems with the 286.
Glad I stumbled upon this channel! RUclips is finally making some good recommendations.
Very Interesting. After I learned about the Fourier Series my respect about the work that even these old CPUs can do has risen immeasurable.
Only the FFT algorithm has made this possible. DFT is hard even for modern CPUs
@@TheRailroad99 The FFT algorithm performs a Discrete Fourier Transform. So a DFT isn't hard, *because* we have FFT. Yes it would be hard if you tried a naive approach, but that's true about many computational problems...
@@benjaminmiller3620 "normal" DFT is not would I would consider a naive approach, because FFT can not always replace it. If the block length is different than 2^n, FFT is not possible.
When I got my first DX4-100 it changed everything. I could finally use my computer for fun things besides dos games. I ran windows 3.1 on that machine as well.
sweet memories for me too
I've always wondered about this question! Great video!
It would be interesting to see how it performs on a mp1 and mp2 encoded file which is more appropriate for the hardware at the time as a kinda control.
Yes can a 486 or pentuim 1 to 2 or 3 play vcd mpeg1?
We take so much for granted nowadays. We have devices in our pocket that can play 4K video files @ 40-50Mbps , nevermind 320Kbps. Interesting video, thanks :)
I only found your channel yesterday but it's so cool 😊
I grew up with 386 and 486's and still remember overclocking a DX2/66 to 80MHz when I was around 10. Built a fan holder out of Lego to keep it cool. Was no Celeron 300A that's for sure!
Off to watch the rest of the videos now.
This was fascinating. I'm catching up on some of your video library. I was craving some CPU Galaxy content. Thanks! 👍 Incredible jump on the dx4.
First video I saw and you got more one subscriber. Good content. 👍
Thank you!
Cool video. Thanks for the flashback. I remember being bitterly disappointed that my DX2 could not play mp3 files using Winamp on Windows 95 back in the university days. I was also gratified to see a similarly configured 86Box machine behaved pretty much the same. I feel old!
My 486 DX2/66 could only play really low bitrate MP3s on Win95. But with DOSAmp it could totally play a normal 128kbit/s 44kHz Stereo MP3 on the Soundblaster 16. The CPU was fully maxxed and it needed a big buffer to not stutter but then it worked.
I used an AMD 5x86-133 back in the day and I remember playing MP3 in winamp in windows 95. CPU wasn't fast enough for stereo playback but worked fine for mono. I still have that same board with CPU and it still works just fine :)
love your videos, im excited to see your future content
Memories! As a kid I used this software on my P133 notebook to listen to music. Yeah, WinAMP didn't run so well on W98. We had a number of parties playing music from that old laptop!
haha, same memories as I have. I can still remember loading mp3s from Napster with my 56k modem 😅. oh my goodness, yeah it was slow. but this times were so damn exciting 😍
Actually, I think winAMP was made in the W98 ERA and most popular back then. My Celeron/PII tilamook 400Mhz could play everything.
Wow, this exactly matched my results with a DX2-80! I maxed out at 64kb/s stereo under DOS as well, using a cheap PCChips board with 128K of (real) L2 cache. Meanwhile, a 300MHz P2 running Foobar2k atop Windows 2000 can play 320kb/s stereo using only 1% of the CPU. Such amazing progress in 3-4 years!
Pentium 2 is way optimized
this was quite a interesting video seeing what it takes to playback mp3 something considered so trivial now
I like all the old tech you have. These videos are pretty interesting as well.
Graphic bars in the app window take more CPU resources than decoding itself. Disable them and you'll see the difference.
That's not necessarily true. You get frequency bands and amplitudes before the iDCT that is part of the MP3 decode. So it's possible to get the information that forms the graphical basis for that without having to do a discrete Fourier transform afterwards.... You can also effectively add a dynamic EQ by emphasizing the data going into the iDCT with little CPU overhead.
@@alanhightower976 Screen output itself wastes CPU time.
Right. In those times, even the display output were ressources you had to account for. At least its textmode, which can (not must) be more quicker. But every moving thing on screen is a cycle you could use.
The FPU is doing all the heavy lifting here. So no, drawing text to the screen isn't going to cost much the CPU many cycles. A 486/33 does not have the floating point performance to decode an MP3. Period.
@@zosxavius Are you sure this isn't a fixed-point decoder? FPU on a 486 is pretty crap.
Nice throwback! I developed mp3blaster for linux on a Pentium 60 in '97 and that was able to play back the higher bitrate mp3's at about 80% CPU load. I don't really remember how optimized the playback library was (it was taken from splay, a basic command line mp3 player at the time).
I remember that there was a library back in the days that claimed it was able to decode high bitrate MP3 in a 486DX2-66, using only integer maths. I downloaded it using gopher (who remembers that?), but I couldn't manage to compile it successfully, I had just gone from high school and my beloved Atari ST at home to the University with PCs/Sparcs (oooh, real computers I thought), I didn't understand 3/4 of what was going on. What days :)
Ahh mp3 blaster. I could literally use that blindly on a old pc. I had to.. because it was a headless machine. Parents didn't allow a pc in the room after bad grades. And in their mind, a monitor was a pc :p
Cool.
I immediately thought of both mpg123 and mp3blaster when I saw the video title 😎.
BTW, I wonder how different was the programing scene back in the day. I guess Most people wanted to work @ Microsoft?
I had the privilege of living through all of this in the 90s. Reaching 30fps on a 3D game in 640x480 was a rarity. Seeing how much those systems strugle with MP3 drastically increases my respect for both encoding technologies and modern SOC's!
Thanks for the great vid. Somehow this obsolete hardware connects directly to my heart (over PCi:-)
I actually did something similar about 20+years ago with 486 DX4-100 or 120, where a DOS player was barely able to play 128kbps, but OS/2 player was buffering playing and stopping to buffer all the time.
This brings back lots of memories, thanks.
I remember being able to play a 128 kbit stereo MP3 file on a 486 SX2-50. You should be able to play it fine on a DX2-66. I think the visualizer is taking up CPU cycles too. I remember the program I used was not graphical at all. It just shows the total frames, the frames played, and the number of skipped frames. I don't recall the name of the program now, but it was around the same time WinPlay 2.35 (yes, even before WinPlay3). I was a kid and a university student in Finland sent the program and an MP3 file via usenet. I was impressed indeed.
If you can find a copy of DOSAmp, I think it'll play better since I don't think it has a visualizer.
Can confirm DOSAmp was the only way on my 486DX2/66. Windows was a stutterfest.
@@joe--cool yeah. I would have loved to see this video redone using DOSamp as the player. I bet he can play more types of MP3 with his collection of 486 CPUs.
10:22 ... marvelous schedule as a summary!
Awesome video, I remember listening to The Prodigy - Breathe when it came out on a DX2/66 at 22khz back in 1997.
That's some funky shit! :p
Amazing video Sir ! Your channel is my best discovery that I have made in 2021...
Ok -- I would love to see videos from you about , PowerPC , SPARC , MIPS now
I've also tried the same thing couple years ago. If I remember, Am5x86 @ 160MHz can play mp3's nicely, and FLAC also with no problems. I tried under Win 95 and old version of Foobar. In Windows DX4/100 was still too slow in my case. Nice video!
Same experience here. My Setup would only start at 133 MHz, but switching the external Clock to 40 MHz in Operation allowed the 160 MHz just fine. And with that I could listen to 128Kbit MP3s without worries. :) 1997 was the year. :)
The DX4-100's in high school played 128kbps fine in Win95. I hosted the discrete server holding all the files (MP3s and Duke3D) stashed in a ceiling.
Was the FPU on AMD Chips perhaps performing worse than intel already in this generation?
@@marcianzero_yt maybe yes. AMD DX4 chips have 8KB internal cache, while Intel have 16KB it may create difference...
The Am5x86 also had 16 KB of L1 Cache.
Super cool video! Thanks!
I vaguely remember getting stereo 128 mp3 running on a 486DX4 maybe 100 or 120mhz with windows 98 and winamp with integer decode on a similar PCI socket 3 motherboard.
Fun channel, keep it up!
We used to encode and play them in Linux back in 96/97. The #MP3 and #Mpeg3 channels on EFNET IRC were the place to be
awesome experment!
Nice! I hope, that I didn't miss it in your video, but in case I didn't, the reason why Pentium is capable to decode MP3 much better, than any 486 is a much better FPU. The MP3 algorithms are based on Fourier Transformation (in particular FFT for Fast Fourier Transformation). This is heavy floating point arithmetic, which needs a powerful FPU. Pentiums FPU was far superior to any 486 CPU, no matter of which frequency or manufacturer. This is by the way the same reason, why Quake plays so much better on a Pentium, this was more or less first famous game, which made use of a strong FPU. Many people like to compare all the fast 486 variants, like Am5x86, to show, that it can beat a Pentium at higher frequencies. Well this comparison is very misleading, because it compares only integer calculation performance, but FPU was the shiny new feature, where Pentium was beating the shit out of 486 :) Your video is a very nice showcase for it. Thank you!
Thank you. you are right, I did not mention in the video the reason for the better performance on the pentium. I forgot to tell coz its clear for me. Please get in touch with my by email. I love your channel and would like to do a somehow collaboration with you. ☺️
... and thanks for watching my content! I am happy to see you here ☺️👍🏻
@@CPUGalaxy Yes, it's the same with me, I sometimes also forget to tell something in my videos, because in that moment it was obvious for me. But not everybody is fit in all this topics, that's why I added this comment. It wasn't to teach you, but more for people who are wandering and would like to know where such a difference is coming from :)
I enjoy your content also very much. Our topics are quite different, but this is why your channel wakes up my interest. This way I can see things I usually don't do and learn something about it. We may be should really get in touch, who knows, what we could do together?! Btw. my mail is also visible in my channel info page, just in case you have something urgent/private ;) And I'm active on dosreloaded.de
Awesome video nice to see what we had in the old days .
amazing content, ive already watched all your videos and i havent had enough
Thank you!
I'm curious if disabling visualisation could help a little bit
Marginally at best, the older 486s simply weren't fast enough to play MP3s.
I've got a video IDEA: In the early 2000s I was trying to play DivX encoded CDs (movies) on a Pentium and it strugled. I was finaly able to play on a overclocked one (from 200 to 225 MHz) However it would be interesting to see what Socket 7 CPU would do this and if MMX would improve something or not.
Indeed mpeg1 vcd could be played on 486 or pentuim 1 or maybe needs pentuim 2 or 3?
Really nice comparison and very interesting stuff!
This is really awesome content. Best kinda benchmark ever when you let different stages of CPU run the same task and check if it can do the job or not. Next would be MPEG Video or something like that. Early AVI or DIVx..... Keep the good work up buddy. Greetings from Germany, neighbour. :D
It'd be interesting to see how the DX2 based (I think) 80mhz AMD chip handles things when clocked at 100 mhz. I suspect that it's a question of just getting the FPU at sufficient speed to bash the numbers out as fast as the data streams off of the HDD. Did AMD sell a version of that processor clocked at that speed?
Pretty sure they sold a DX3/100.
@@geonerd Now THAT would make an interesting test case. If you look at how things were scaling it seems to imply MP3 decode functionality would start scaling up rapidly from 80mhz onward, but a real apples to apples comparison would be needed to confirm this.
Having lived this exact situation on my old 486sx, I can say with certainty...no...not really. I wasn’t able to really listen to anything but WAV and MIDI until I had a K6-2.
I'm new subscriber and viewer!
I would like to tank you so much for the wonderful information in this video!
Thank you for being here. I appreciate my viewers a lot and try my best to make interesting content as well to improve the quality of my videos. 🙂
@@CPUGalaxy No...no
Thank you for your time and hard work to make such an amazing video us all!
I do remember the hardware struggle to play play files, the solution was often to find either a different format och where parts of the song where made in to samples so to play it through tracker, listen through the cd-player. Also the option to play music through an external soundcard that could take the load off the processor. very useful when the game used to much processing power. Sometimes even listen to the game audio tracks on the stereo while playing the game :-). It's a nostagic memory trip, so I like to thank you for making this video, as for me to remember again :-)
nice video.
There was an mp3 player coded in asm that would play 256Kbit mp3s on any dx2 and you vould still use the pc. Dont remember de name, but was great
Likely DOSAmp, it was amazing.
The Germans are taking over my list of favorite RUclipsrs! Sabine Hossenfelder, Mathologer, TheOftler, GreatScott!... and now you. :-D Love from America!
And I'd be remiss not to make a DOS BOOT! joke. :-P
Thank you. But I am from Austria 🇦🇹 😉
@@CPUGalaxy I certainly apologize. Keep up the excellent work!
no problem. Germans and Austrians do speak the same language 😉
@@CPUGalaxy Machst echt super Videos! Leiwand rauszufinden dassd auch noch a Österreicher bist haha
this is one reason why the MMX instruction set was introduced on the Pentium Cpu's, this could handle dedicated multimedia task way better..
This video was super interesting, Thanks!
WinPlay3 can decrease sound quality of played song to make it more handleable for 486 cpu
Can the PODP decode CD-quality files in stereo? Assuming linear utilization scaling, it should be possible.
Non compressed files should play fine on all those cpus.
What's your definition of CD quality? When MP3 was the big new thing, 128kbps was considered near CD quality, with 320kbps being considered 'transparent'. 320kbps is the highest officially supported MP3 bitrate too.
If by CD-quality, you mean plain old PCM (i.e literally CD audio), that will play on a much slower machine because it is uncompressed audio; there's no decompression going on; it's just dumping out audio to the sound card- at this point, you're basically at the mercy of the I/O system on your PC.
@CPU Galaxy, it would be interesting to see this test repeated with AAC audio; I was impressed that even running under Windows 95B, I could play FLAC and high bitrate AAC audio on a Pentium 166 under clocked to 75MHz, and with 16MB RAM, using a modern player (foobar2000).
CDs are recorded in uncompressed 44100Hz stereo audio, and being that cards in that era were also 44100Hz you basically just read the audio and push it into the sound card's buffer.
Never the less because of the amount of data, even if it wasnt cpu intensive, it took quite a chunk of bandwith from your memory and pci bus so most software just assumed you had your cd analog output conected to your sound card.
You technically could do it but afaik only since windows95 there was some kind of "digital audio output" support. Though to be honest i still use the analog output on my mmx200 because otherwise cpu spikes could cause the music to skip. Id recommend analog for anything below a pentium 2.
Now that i think about it, imagine a desktop case (not a tower case) with a pentium cpu being used as a media center pc.......you tecnically could and with 1-2GB of hard drive you could have quite a few CDs in MP3 format. Throw in a vga card with composite out, a 29" crt tv, an qireless infrared keyboard and a good audio system hooked to the tv and you have quite a nice looking retro media center xD
You mean wave?
@@laharl2k CD bitrate doesn't use that much bandwidth. Roughly 11 megs a minute. That's nothing for a PCI bus. Or even an ISA bus, which the first 1X CD-ROM drives came with an ISA controller card.
Very cool and informative vid, thanks buddy
It's fascinating to see some old processors struggling to perform tasks that nowadays look so simple. It makes you understand that even decoding a simple mp3 requires some kind of processing power, that by today standards seems ridicolous but before could be considered a lot. Nice video.
Are you Arnold Schwarzenegger's brother? Great video 🙂
It took me almost 10 seconds before I knew that you were actually speaking English 🤔
It took me 2. Whats your point?
Exactly what I remember back in the days. Cheers!
Shows just how good it is to have some floating point math dedicated to a task, where you do not have any general purpose processor other than the one 8 bit one doing housekeeping, while the rest of the silicon is optimised to only handle audio encode and decode. Decode is somewhat easier, as it only has to recover the compressed data back into the full bandwidth stream and parse it out via DMA to the sound card, while encoding has to pull in the same audio and speculatively test to see if any FFT bin is masked according to the filter, then drop those masked blocks, and then compress the rest of it to a smaller size block of data, while simultaneously writing the previous blocks that are complete out, getting the next ones in, and shrinking the data down to fit the block size.
Then handle a file system that can be non contiguous, and disk write rates that vary all over the place because the drive takes a lot of time to change cylinders and write non contiguous sectors. Oh yes, also update a FAT structure on the fly, where you have to go in to the last FAT block, see what is available, and append to it. Video funny enough can be smaller in size, as poor quality is not as objectionable, compared to poor audio, which is very nasty. You can watch 144p video with only little problem, but try the same with 8kHz mono sub telephone quality audio, it is horrid.
I heard that the minimum specification was quite high when the mp3 file standard was released.
Thanks for the demo video :)
i stil like dos and old retro computers i colect them , for me was a pleasure to see this. thenx
Fascinating. My first PC, which I build myself, was a 486sx33. It was all I could afford as a student.
Couldn't wait to see this video and it hasn't disapointed! Loved it!
I still wonder about my memories using a 486SX tho. The linux soft-fpu seems to be ~10x slower than the real deal, altho quite a bit faster and common DOS fpu emulators. Which I admit makes me scratch my head a bit. The only two things in my favour is that the player I used was purely commandline, no vumeters or anything. Not even a progressbar. Anything like that and it didn't work. The second thing is I never programmed under a dos extender like the player in your video uses, just realmode programs. So I'm not authority on the matter, but maybe there is a overhead there compared to running purely in protected mode under linux? Especially if this player uses DPMI to use DOS api to update the display that often. The context switching that requires might account for some of the difference.
But honestly, under the best conditions I can only see that making it possible to use a 486DX-33, maybe with some fairydust a 486DX-25 (do they exist?). But not a 486SX2-50. Guess I'll have to setup an eBay alert for when a system comparable to what I had shows up to resolve this mystery from my past. :)
That was actually really interesting! To think we used to play games on the DX-33. Crazy..
I remember once trying to play an MP3 file on a 486 laptop (I think it was a DX2-66) using a simple DOS player. It worked, but it used up nearly 100% of the CPU and playback wasn’t perfect. It made me appreciate more how much work it takes to decode MP3’s and how much CPUs have improved.
This was extremely interesting!
Great video. I'm surprised! I would have thought higher compression would have required more CPU grunt to unpack in realtime. Interesting results!
It's because this kind of compression simply removes data, which means the file won't be decompressed to the original bit rate. Instead, it'll play at lower quality
Discovered your channel yesterday and have to say, I am enjoying the content immensely! I do have on critique, and that is with your audio. The quality is great, but if you could possibly add a bit of compression to it, that would make it much easier to hear you for certain viewers such as myself when using laptop speakers since these speakers cant reproduce the lower notes of your voice, and the volume isnt quite normalized to what the levels should be. For reference, I watch most videos at volume level 30 on my laptop, but I have to watch yours at 50. Just something to think about!
Im still loving the channel and definitely want to see what is in store for the future! Keep it up!
P.S. I am curious... Are you Swedish?
The same can be said today for fairly recent processors unable to play 4K videos when a cheap TV box can.
@@tripplefives1402 In the video the author was comparing MP3 Playes to computer CPUs, hence my comment...
Great content - thanks! I recall playing mp3 files on my first PC which was a Pentium 133 MHz. They would eat up about 25% of CPU in Winamp.
1996 pentuim 1? Would that play mpeg1vcd file? Or needed 1999 pentuim 3 for it? Or could 1995 486 with mpeg card 🤔 do it?
Great video! This would be a nice addition as a benchmark to the 486 DX4 Battle you did before (Intel, CX, AMD). I wonder how they compare, specially the CX with its optimizations applied.
I really needed that DOS player in my life
Really interesting. Thank you for comparing it.
Excellent video and channel.
A bit surprised by the result. I know for a fact that an Am486 DX2-66 can play a 128kbit stereo mp3 without (well almost without) skipping...at least on some players, because I did that way back when.
I can't remember which player I used, but it wasn't nearly as fancy as this one. As far as I can recall the player didn't have any output to screen at all. And if it did, it was only some minimal info about the file.
It's possible that the added screen effects are just too much...however...it is also very possible that the player I used just leveraged a large memory buffer. I did have 20 MB of RAM - which was HUGE for the time.
This is interesting! I had a DX50 and I used to decode three songs to wav and then just listen to those for some days. Then decode some new ones. It was a big day for me when I got a faster CPU so I did not need to do that anymore. But then it started all over with video. 😅
Reminds me of the early 2000's where we used to have DIY MP3 Projects to convert old PCs or Laptops into MP3 players.
Fast forward to 2020's and we're looking for ways to reuse old smartphones as security cameras and gaming emulators.
Very Interesting video many thanks
The jump from DX2-80 to DX4-100 is quite large. It had double the cache, that's probably a major factor.
A video I never knew I wanted to see.
😉
Great vid!!
Excellent!! Thanks 😊
The robot voice intro that matches your accent is pretty rad.
Impressive that the cache in the dx4 helps that much. I remember needing to OC my am5x86-133 to 160 to play 128 kbps mp3s and have windows be useful.
I had a 486-DX4 100 back until like 1999 or so. Was really a good machine, countless hours of Doom and most music I listened from Audio-CDs. The Pentium 1 machines at school were so messed up with all those change tracking applications and accessibility software that they felt a lot slower.
Very Good Video !
I found that very same thing out, in that order using WplayPro in windows 95. I've always kept it in my mind that you needed 100MHz + to play mp3's @128-44k.
Mind you, A 386 40MHz with 8 MB ram and a fresh copy of windows 95c takes less than 20 seconds to start in case you were wondering. Very nice video, I am glad to see I wasn't wrong in my thinking back 20 years ago.
The very first computer I got hold of was a dx2-66 and I was definitely able to play 128kbit MP3's on it. I was on Windows and was using very early winamp and some command line tool. It started off choppy but I was determined to play the file so I started messing with 'stuff' and got it to play smoothly. I remember it distinctly because it was the first time I ever 'fixed' a computer problem. I've now been a sysadmin for 20 years and trying to play pirated music was what got me into the whole thing in the first place!
Your videos are great! I actually am very passionate about ICs as well. Could you suggest some cool way I can preserve/store my first tape out which I just received a week ago? I want to keep it as a souvenir.
Nice Video!
In 1993 I had a AMD386-40 and a friend of mine worked on audio coding at the university. He was part the university group that created predecessors to MPEG 1 Layer 3. Since I had a self build 16 bit ISA soundcard back then, I became a candidate for testing the encoder and decoder. I remember the CPU was by far not able to decode audio in real time so it had to write a 3 minute song onto the HDD which took like 10+ minutes. Encoding took even a lot longer. I remember that I encoded Duran Duran Ordinary world and it took a lot over 1 hour. I ripped that song of the CD with the same selfmade soundcard using SPDIF. The HDD was a 540MB Maxtor. Computers have come quite far since then.
Great content!!!
Ahhh the memories! I've used that player on my 486 100!
I did some work on DAB playback (MP2 digital streams) under Windows on hardware of about that period, and contrary to this belief you didn’t need fast FPU units for playback. The best decode library I found was pure integer. The official manufacturer software used MMX FP, but I could get equal or better playback with integer math. Pentium class CPUs did seem to be the order of the day though, so I suspect that the audio player software shown was also using integer math.
I never had a 486, but I had a friend who had a mac with an 040 when I had a dual Pentium, and I took some music over in MP3 format for him to listen to not realizing how CPU intensive the playback really was. We had to download a decoder to change them back to WAV files, which took a LONG time... like, "leave and come back later" long.
Amazing to see how technology evolves...