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Comment by baq | Hacker News Reader

I remember times when it wasn’ts problem on much less than that… which is what most people had. Guess I’m just old :)

On x86, a Pentium 75 was just about the absolute minimum for playing the common 128 kbps stereo MP3s of the time.

A DX4/100 could just barely do it if you were running a performant MS-DOS player and doing nothing else at the same time (the 486 of course had dramatically worse floating point performance than a Pentium clocked at the same frequency).

My Pentium 166 MMX running Windows 95 and Winamp 0.x got 100% loaded while playing my first ever mp3 file - brought home on 3 floppy disks. That's why games of that era were using CD Audio for soundtrack or tracker music like Unreal or Deus Ex.

Part of that is was probably just Windows 9x's terrible multitasking, coupled with a badly-written MP3 decoder. We generally suffered software in those days that really held back those machines from what thy were capable of. The MMX Pentiums were perfectly capable of decoding an MP3 in real time.

My old 233 MHz MMX Pentium machine could decode MPEG-4 standard definition video with an MP3 audio track, under Linux. Though I had to set my video player to real-time priority if I wanted it to not drop frames.

Unreal, Unreal Return to Napali, and Unreal Tournament used S3M files for music. Not CD Music

That's what I exactly said. Read it again please.

That's exactly how I did it yes. DX4/100, and a dedicated DOS player that could play one song at a time.

Of course back then, much of my collection was in XM format.

guess i'm really old then, memory was failing... incidentally, my first non-toy PC was a Pentium 75. coincidence?

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