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Comment by beloch | Hacker News Reader

Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.

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For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono.

MP3 decoders have, thankfully, gotten faster since the 90s. But yes, a 66MHz is pushing it indeed.

Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.

Yeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had

Yeah. Seeing that made me very happy, being the proud owner of a dual CPU (no, not dual core!) AMD K6. :-)

I never noticed any problems, but I did have the mmx version. It wasn't fast but never did the playback stutter , even with dreamweaver and several browser windows

Even as late as in 2008 I had such a slow machine that when I had to use NetBeans and I wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd just play music CDs with headphones plugged into the headphones port of the cdrom drive :)

jeez, were you running a cyrix 6x86 in 2008??

Nope, just a late 90s pentium running linux.

I went through a rough patch from 2002 to 2009 and couldn't afford new hardware, other than when I was finally able to get a second-hand laptop.

Before the laptop, I'd go visit customers with my pc tower and ask for peripherals when I got to their office, fun times. Well, not really, but I can laugh now ;)

Well, I looked it up and the game shipped in the early 2000s, and listed Pentium 266 as minimum requirements (Pentium 500 recommended).

I don't recall the 386 era and the DVD era overlapping that much…

CDROM and 386 would have been an odd combination though?

My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s

There were lots of us. Computers were expensive as hell compared to a cd upgrade.

And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better!

The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best to reboot? I sort of hate whatever marketing genius figured out to label it "Turbo" instead of "Slow" But they definitely earned their bonus.

The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.

The way I remember the turbo button it just halved the clock speed when not depressed, but it didn't bring it back to the original IBM PC's speed.

I do remember using it to make older games play less bad, but, as you say, this rarely worked, I think precisely because the speed was never the original one (I don't remember the clock speed of my first PC, but the first one with a turbo button ran at 33 MHz which I'm sure is a lot more than twice the speed of the first one; seems closer to 8x from what a quick search implies).

It was more than half (depending on age). I thought it always took you to 4.77 MHz to match the original 5150.

I didn't know, thanks, you've sent me down a small rabbit hole reading up on this!

Sure. I never understood it as a kid. The fact it slowed your computer always confused me since I didn’t realize it was on by default.

I didn’t learn the real purpose until long after they were gone.

Yes, our first family PC was a 386 that we could slow down from 33 to 16 MHz with the Turbo button. It even had the segment display to show the current clock rate.

I knew what it was for and had some old games that ran too fast, but from what I remember, in most cases 16 MHz was still much too fast, so I didn't use the button much.

I think it was no problem to switch Turbo mode on and off in the middle of running software.

mp2's files were almost usable on 386 but they used tons of space.

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