[leeter]

The pedant in me wants to point out that most 486s couldn't play MP3s (they just don't have the horsepower, an AM-586 or a DX4 maybe) and you'd need a Pentium. /pedant

OK now to my real point. Vista is actually a really good call out of MS being inconsistent about this. The major changes in Vista (Moving graphics drivers largely out of the kernel, simplifying what sound drivers could do) were all predicated on the fact that hardware vendors are notoriously bad at software. This cannot be understated just how bad they are, NTKernel was originally intended such that vendors would make their own HAL.. one tried and it was so bad MS just NOPE.jpg'd that and did it themselves. So for MS to double down on a system that relies on the same known to be horrible at software vendors is just hilarious to me.

[Scoundreller]

A 486 DX4-100 could play mp3s in stereo (or in mono at 66mhz), but do absolutely nothing else at the same time. I used a DOS mp3 player (mpxplay) and it could be done.

Docs suggest stereo is possible at DX2-80mhz if you disabled screen output and heavy mp3 file pre-buffering.

Top level comment here claims the issue was the on-screen animations and they were able to build a highly optimized mp3 player on a 286 (dunno through what speaker): https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=b0zZpzxHSeM

Even on a later pentium, I had to minimize throttle priority on my web browser because smooth scrolling requires a ton of juice. Still does to this day looking at power consumption on an iPhone.

[leeter]

> Even on a later pentium

MMX helped a lot here, I remember my Pentium MMX 233 had no trouble playing games and playing music. To give you an idea of how crapy that machine was otherwise... it was a Packard Bell with an onboard ATI chip that barely qualified for 3D acceleration. The Pentium 166 (non-MMX) we had would chug on things that the MMX just didn't care about.

> I had to minimize throttle priority on my web browser because smooth scrolling requires a ton of juice. Still does to this day looking at power consumption on an iPhone.

This still to this day amuses me. Metal and DX12 both have calls designed to support this natively on the GPU by allowing the application to shift the rendered area of a very specific box (without rerendering the entire screen) and then render behind in the blank. As far as I know only Safari on iOS does this even close to properly and even then it has other iOS Safari related quirks around that that Apple refuses to fix.