80386 playing MP3 at 8khz 16kbps.

This is my old AM386DX-40 and playing Gina-G at 8khz 16kbps mono.
The case was from a old pentium computer so i build the 386 instead.
I have alot of these old motherboards from 8088,286,386sx/dx,80486 so i put this one together and return the old dos games to his hdd.

It's cool to see old computers are still alife, and in this case playing todays mp3 music file. 40Mhz is realy the minium speed for a mp3 to play smooth at 16kbps. I've also used a 33mhz but it works only on 8kbps but is sounds SOOO UGLY!!! At full quality a 100Mhz 486DX4 is needed.
Coprocessor is one thing you needed if you want to play mp3 on a 386 or else he won't play it. I tested 3 brand FPU's "Intel387, IIT4c87 and CYRIX Fast math" Tested on 33mhz and played mp3 with 8khz 8kbps mono. As they sad ... "intel was the slowest fpu in that time" it won't play smooth enough compare with IIT and FastMath CYRIX.

CubicPlay was one of the popular music player in the DOS world before winamp does today. CP visualization in my opinion most coolest than winamp and support mostknown music format, Midi, wav, Mod, s3m, it, xm, mp3, mp2,sid... and you can still download it from www.cubic.org/player

To play it in winXP you have to install VDMS sound emulator to run it. Win95/98 is not needed. MSDOS just set you soundcard drivers thats all.
You really need 8mb of memory (may run on 4mb) and a 386sx minium +/- 25mhz?? just to play xm,it,mod or s3m's that don't need the FPU exept Mp3. Parameters can be set in CP.INI for slower CPU's.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ThePDI
• Doom
• 386
• 80386DX
• old
• computer
• wolfenstein
• 80286
• cubic
• player

[ThePDI]

the visualization has no impack on de CPU speed, because the CPU wait more for decoded processing from the coprocessor. larger kbps gives more floating point time wiche cause the sound lagg.

I've also tryed other FPU's like Intel, IIT, Cyrix fast Math. and model type like 80387 4C87DLC

DLC's for cyrix early 486's was the fastes. Intel was at that time slow

It's also explain the pentium 60 Mhz vs 80486DX4 133Mhz. and if you know Quake I ,pentium's FPU beats 486 FPU runs much better

[AndyK967]

Do it faster by defrag the HD!

[HowTo000]

@javier29m90 lol 

[coondogtheman1234]

if you turn off all visualization effects could you maybe play a higher quality file. What is the highest quality mp3 you can play on this w/o issues?

[Dant2142]

@thelyniezian The coprocessor is little more than just a floating-point unit, something that's been intergrated into CPUs since the 486! (about 1990)

[Vocoder07]

ah good old times of ISA cardbus ..:D

[mateo123i]

can this run 128kbps ?

[thelyniezian]

I'm frankly quite surprised MP3s will play on anything this old, though I suppose the co-processor explains it.

But... Gina G? Why? (That if anything brings back the memoies of the 90s I guess, admittedly...)

[TahreyUK]

OK, seriously, it was ess you bee. The first three letters of submarine. What?!

So if I was describing a sandwich made out of a baguette, or using that prefix for any other situation, or talking colloquially about marine vessels that travel below the surface, I'd get filtered out?

Rewriting the missing part ("2b", I guess):

(or low end 486s anyway) because you could extract the audio from HQ files,

[TahreyUK]

By the way, as it could output to WAVfiles, I have a feeling they only even allowed mp3 playback on sub-486 (or

Right, deleting a word at a time. It's not mp3, or HQ, so ... what is it? Am I going to have to actually start at the end and work backwards, slowly deleting stuff, until it works?