Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mhd 3844 days ago
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.
1 comments
bestham 3844 days ago
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...

link
mhd 3844 days ago
That sounds awesome, like an update to the old Covox Speech Thing. I sometimes miss my parallel port (or the even weirder BeBox thingamajig).
link