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Comment by josteink | Hacker News Reader

I couldn't even play MP3s on my Amiga 500 without doing seriously degraded decoding (skipping high-frequency components and reducing playback resolution from 44kHz to 11kHz).

If someone can make a Z80 play MP3s, in any form, I'm impressed.

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MP3 support requires a decoder card according to the page; I remember running into the same issues on my 486.

Basically, if you plug an entirely separate new computer into your Z80-based computer, you can play MP3s on your Z80-based computer.

So you make your computer into one of those mp3 playing thumbdrives then...

( If I remember right, some of them are basically Z80 cpu with MP3 decoding DSP built it. )

Yes, those were called S1 players. You could build your own custom firmware for them:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S1_MP3_player

I want a z80 with a nanogpu, for glorious, flicker free, 8bit UI compositing.

Not really "nano", but.. http://forum.6502.org/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=3329

Thank you so much !

Yes, I had a 133-mhz 486 and had comparable or better performance than the Pentium-60s and 90s, but mp3 was a big exception (at least until someone made a non-floating-point decoder library). Doing that on a z80 would either mean some in-name-only z80 contemporary clone or external decode hardware.

Or maybe a Fabrice Bellard project.

I remember the lp3 [1], a LPT printer port dongle / sound card. It was a DSUB-25 parallel port passthrough with a headphone jack on the side. You piped an undecoded mp3 stream into it via a Winamp plugin and any machine running Win95 or higher could "play mp3s".

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20000311130535/http://lp3music.c...

That sounds awesome, like an update to the old Covox Speech Thing. I sometimes miss my parallel port (or the even weirder BeBox thingamajig).

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