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that's right! or access the drive at all. that made it a nonstarter for me as i was trying to build a player for fat32 formatted cd-roms full of mp3s.

of course the bigger problem was that the r3k was too slow. (i ported mpg123 over to run in fixed point, but it still was many times realtime to decode a frame). i wish i'd known about this gte vector unit thing, that may have been a way to make it work... but ah well,

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One thing the PS1 did have going for it was a MDEC jpeg decoder chip. Pretty much all of the FMV in PS1 games were MJPEG (a stream of independent jpegs). Between that and using the rasterizer to apply motion vectors and color interpolation, the machine was pretty well set up to do MPEG1.

The PS2 had an MDEC too. We used it in one game to do the pop-up talking head dialog between characters mid-gameplay with tiny RAM and CPU use.

Playing Mpeg Layer 2 files would be fast enough for the PS1 then.

You could play MP2 files just fine.

layer 2 was significantly lower quality at lower bitrates, significantly less computationally expensive to encode or decode and significantly less popular as a format for storing music.

i wanted to be able to play mp3 collections from psx units attached to home entertainment systems. there really weren't many other options back then.

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