I agree, testing software emulation on a multi-purpose CPU always means testing both the soft- and hardware. The whole video is quite disappointing.

There've been successful efforts to decode MP3s in real time on C64s (without additional hardware of course - there's the mp3@c64 which is basically a tacked on standalone MP3 player) - albeit at quite low quality. Never the less an incredible proof of concept that a 1MHz 8Bit CPU can pull it off.

@@1337Shockwav3 I'm old enough to remember speech on the C64. IT would blank the screen to save a few processor cycles.

286 cpu can't decode in realtime even 8kHz mono mp3 (not to mention it's 16 bit cpu and most mp3 decoders are 32 bit programs)

Yeah, those spectra are basically FFT transforms, unless they use the mp3 coefficients, but I'm guessing no...

Just like bitcoin miner.

well there was no equivalent at the time 486 dx was common

Nowadays is not needed for audio, modern CPUs are so ridiculously powerful that they can handle DAWs with very, very low latencies. I'm using an almost 10 year old i7 and producing music with real time emulations of analog synthesizers, meanwhile a 486 can't even decode an mp3 very well. It's said that modern CPU power killed sound cards and other stuff.

@@saricubra2867 There are still external processors for audio. That's called DSP, one of them is inside Universal Audio Apollo series.

@@RinaldoJonathan Yes, but nowhere near as powerful as a modern CPU with the DAC. Edit: The Universal Audio Apollo is an external DAC or amp, all the audio processing, encoding and other stuff is still done by the CPU. Nowadays, the best combination for music production is the best CPU you can buy with an external DAC and very high quality speakers, headphones. But on board DACs are also very good nowadays.

Thank you!

They really are. I never had the opportunity to own such interesting hardware back then so watching his videos is awesome. I love old tech stuff.

I discovered buddy the other day and have been enjoying his content as well :)

Same here, I have been binge watching all of the videos from this channel since last week.

Me too. So relatable, around the 2000s I often went to a known computer store dump to find exactly these parts thrown away and as I was at school and had not much money so seeing this again brings back memory. Challenge Number 1 was to find 30-pin SIMMs with more than 1 MB.

I imagine that this channel is going to really take off over the coming months

Thank you. I did not expect that. This vintage computer things are just my real passion and thought to make some videos. But I am happy that there are so many out there who like to watch my content. 🙂

Not worry, this channel will suddenly skyrocket when KZfaq starts promoting it. Not that long anymore. Just be glad you're one of the first 10k subs

Very nice video, I've overclocked my dx4 to 120 to be able to listen to mp3s in windows 3.1 Didn't know there was an optimized for app for this, will find it and try it out

@@CPUGalaxy it's the passion that people like us love, you're like the bigclive of CPUs

150 mhz Pentium had 60 Mhz Bus. It was 2.5x 60 Mhz. (luckily). Almost 100% of time, it could be overclocked to 66x2.5, so regular 166 Mhz Pentium. But was of course cheaper. Not many people knew about overclocking, usually only tech nerds, in it's time, but those who knew it, could spare a little $50 dollars. :)

@@warrax111 Yes, you're right, my bad, I was thinking of my first Pentium 75. I had a really cheap PC Chips motherboard, I could never get it stable at 166mhz. Years later I used that CPU on a different motherboard and it was happy at 166 and I got it to boot at 180mhz but wasn't stable. Back then you could tell the difference in boot up times!

@@acorredorv yea, nice story. I had only 486 in its time of 1997, it was quite slow in 1997 already, but anyway, we upgraded then to 133 mhz pentium. I didnt know about overclocking, would try 166, but first time I've overclocked something was in 1999. Btw that 150 Pentium I have right now in retro comp, that I've built last months, so I know it, cause I've played with it a lot. Overclocked it to 187 mhz (75x2.5). 200 Mhz is too much, would even boot. Mobo is QDI Titanium with TX chipset, so very fast setup. Would be very happy, if I have it in its time. Overclocking is though BIOS, one of the first motherboards with jumperless overclocking in BIOS. It is very stable and good motherboard, even Anandtech was happy with it www.anandtech.com/show/24/3 I can put there Pentium MMX, but I've kept Classic one, so I can underclock to 75 Mhz. Unfortunately, Pentium MMX doesn't use 1.5x multiplier, and interpretes it as 3.5x. So lowest possible is 50 FSB x 2 = 100 Mhz. So I've kept Pentium 150, so I can go to 75 mhz. It is my favourite speed for Pentium, cause it's so nostalgic. Slower than Pentium 66 usually. :) But anyway, switching CPU is very easy, as I have ones with cooler attached to it, I don't have to take off coolers on them, just open Case and switch them like RAM. :) That PC chips, I understand, what you mean. But luckily, if you could go at least stock speed stable, it was worth money, as they were very cheap. Made many people happy, but also, many people unhappy. :)

Good times, firing up Word and hoping Winamp will keep on playing your tunes. Then everything came to a stuttering halt when Word decided to auto spellcheck.

It sure did whip the llama's ass.

Also There is One guy Who made Video Play on a 8088 IBM PC kzfaq.info/get/bejne/g72UepdimNSym30.html With Tools and All To make it work.

I would love to see if with modern techniques there is some way to develop newer software targetting to get better performance for both video rendering and mp3 playing! Maybe also developing a different encoding scheme altogether for both video and music, besides the new players.

Woah i never expected to find YOU here. Guess you have a fetish for thick german accents and old hardware xD

like honestly, how did you even find this Sal?

If you wonder how Sal is here , he ran minecraft in windows 98. So , he is an old hardware fanboy as well .

Uhh, AFAIK it was because of DVDs.

@@tripplefives1402 I beg to differ. DVD came along in 1996. Plenty of people were still using them then. And those cards weren't for just audio. From what I can find they were for video and audio, special games designed for them.

I remember it was not as much DVD but CD-ROMs with MPEG video on them. Mid-nineties, video was used more and more in games, but also in stuff like encyclopedias and magazines or demos, it was the way to enjoy your ‘multimedia PC’. So you could buy these MPEG decoder cards that could often be tacked on to a video card and were relatively cheap, and ensured you could run it without stuttering - especially on a lower end system.

MPEG decoders were mostly for FMV games on CDROM on 486 class machines. MPEG2 decoders were for anything pre-P3 that needed to play back DVD video.

@@timramich virtually no one had DVD until about 98

Winamp was great in this:)

I remember i have to play some mp3 while playing some older games as pentium was too fast for those games

surely nothing liquid nitrogen couldnt fix.

Yes, i also tweak here and there to make it work. Also then pc freezed for other task. Haha

There was also an MS-DOS MP3 player I played with back in the day...MXPLAY I think it was called, I think...

sweet memories for me too

Only the FFT algorithm has made this possible. DFT is hard even for modern CPUs

@@TheRailroad99 The FFT algorithm performs a Discrete Fourier Transform. So a DFT isn't hard, *because* we have FFT. Yes it would be hard if you tried a naive approach, but that's true about many computational problems...

@@benjaminmiller3620 "normal" DFT is not would I would consider a naive approach, because FFT can not always replace it. If the block length is different than 2^n, FFT is not possible.

haha, same memories as I have. I can still remember loading mp3s from Napster with my 56k modem 😅. oh my goodness, yeah it was slow. but this times were so damn exciting 😍

Actually, I think winAMP was made in the W98 ERA and most popular back then. My Celeron/PII tilamook 400Mhz could play everything.

I remember that there was a library back in the days that claimed it was able to decode high bitrate MP3 in a 486DX2-66, using only integer maths. I downloaded it using gopher (who remembers that?), but I couldn't manage to compile it successfully, I had just gone from high school and my beloved Atari ST at home to the University with PCs/Sparcs (oooh, real computers I thought), I didn't understand 3/4 of what was going on. What days :)

Ahh mp3 blaster. I could literally use that blindly on a old pc. I had to.. because it was a headless machine. Parents didn't allow a pc in the room after bad grades. And in their mind, a monitor was a pc :p

Cool.

I immediately thought of both mpg123 and mp3blaster when I saw the video title 😎.

BTW, I wonder how different was the programing scene back in the day. I guess Most people wanted to work @ Microsoft?

Pentium 2 is way optimized

Thank you!

Yes can a 486 or pentuim 1 to 2 or 3 play vcd mpeg1?

That's not necessarily true. You get frequency bands and amplitudes before the iDCT that is part of the MP3 decode. So it's possible to get the information that forms the graphical basis for that without having to do a discrete Fourier transform afterwards.... You can also effectively add a dynamic EQ by emphasizing the data going into the iDCT with little CPU overhead.

@@alanhightower976 Screen output itself wastes CPU time.

Right. In those times, even the display output were ressources you had to account for. At least its textmode, which can (not must) be more quicker. But every moving thing on screen is a cycle you could use.

The FPU is doing all the heavy lifting here. So no, drawing text to the screen isn't going to cost much the CPU many cycles. A 486/33 does not have the floating point performance to decode an MP3. Period.

@@zosxavius Are you sure this isn't a fixed-point decoder? FPU on a 486 is pretty crap.

Same experience here. My Setup would only start at 133 MHz, but switching the external Clock to 40 MHz in Operation allowed the 160 MHz just fine. And with that I could listen to 128Kbit MP3s without worries. :) 1997 was the year. :)

The DX4-100's in high school played 128kbps fine in Win95. I hosted the discrete server holding all the files (MP3s and Duke3D) stashed in a ceiling.

Was the FPU on AMD Chips perhaps performing worse than intel already in this generation?

@@marcianzero_yt maybe yes. AMD DX4 chips have 8KB internal cache, while Intel have 16KB it may create difference...

The Am5x86 also had 16 KB of L1 Cache.

And I'd be remiss not to make a DOS BOOT! joke. :-P

Thank you. But I am from Austria 🇦🇹 😉

@@CPUGalaxy I certainly apologize. Keep up the excellent work!

no problem. Germans and Austrians do speak the same language 😉

@@CPUGalaxy Machst echt super Videos! Leiwand rauszufinden dassd auch noch a Österreicher bist haha

Thank you. you are right, I did not mention in the video the reason for the better performance on the pentium. I forgot to tell coz its clear for me. Please get in touch with my by email. I love your channel and would like to do a somehow collaboration with you. ☺️

... and thanks for watching my content! I am happy to see you here ☺️👍🏻

@@CPUGalaxy Yes, it's the same with me, I sometimes also forget to tell something in my videos, because in that moment it was obvious for me. But not everybody is fit in all this topics, that's why I added this comment. It wasn't to teach you, but more for people who are wandering and would like to know where such a difference is coming from :) I enjoy your content also very much. Our topics are quite different, but this is why your channel wakes up my interest. This way I can see things I usually don't do and learn something about it. We may be should really get in touch, who knows, what we could do together?! Btw. my mail is also visible in my channel info page, just in case you have something urgent/private ;) And I'm active on dosreloaded.de

That's some funky shit! :p

Thank you!

Marginally at best, the older 486s simply weren't fast enough to play MP3s.

We used to encode and play them in Linux back in 96/97. The #MP3 and #Mpeg3 channels on EFNET IRC were the place to be

Pretty sure they sold a DX3/100.

@@geonerd Now THAT would make an interesting test case. If you look at how things were scaling it seems to imply MP3 decode functionality would start scaling up rapidly from 80mhz onward, but a real apples to apples comparison would be needed to confirm this.

Indeed mpeg1 vcd could be played on 486 or pentuim 1 or maybe needs pentuim 2 or 3?

Non compressed files should play fine on all those cpus.

What's your definition of CD quality? When MP3 was the big new thing, 128kbps was considered near CD quality, with 320kbps being considered 'transparent'. 320kbps is the highest officially supported MP3 bitrate too. If by CD-quality, you mean plain old PCM (i.e literally CD audio), that will play on a much slower machine because it is uncompressed audio; there's no decompression going on; it's just dumping out audio to the sound card- at this point, you're basically at the mercy of the I/O system on your PC. @CPU Galaxy, it would be interesting to see this test repeated with AAC audio; I was impressed that even running under Windows 95B, I could play FLAC and high bitrate AAC audio on a Pentium 166 under clocked to 75MHz, and with 16MB RAM, using a modern player (foobar2000).

CDs are recorded in uncompressed 44100Hz stereo audio, and being that cards in that era were also 44100Hz you basically just read the audio and push it into the sound card's buffer. Never the less because of the amount of data, even if it wasnt cpu intensive, it took quite a chunk of bandwith from your memory and pci bus so most software just assumed you had your cd analog output conected to your sound card. You technically could do it but afaik only since windows95 there was some kind of "digital audio output" support. Though to be honest i still use the analog output on my mmx200 because otherwise cpu spikes could cause the music to skip. Id recommend analog for anything below a pentium 2. Now that i think about it, imagine a desktop case (not a tower case) with a pentium cpu being used as a media center pc.......you tecnically could and with 1-2GB of hard drive you could have quite a few CDs in MP3 format. Throw in a vga card with composite out, a 29" crt tv, an qireless infrared keyboard and a good audio system hooked to the tv and you have quite a nice looking retro media center xD

You mean wave?

@@laharl2k CD bitrate doesn't use that much bandwidth. Roughly 11 megs a minute. That's nothing for a PCI bus. Or even an ISA bus, which the first 1X CD-ROM drives came with an ISA controller card.

Thank you for being here. I appreciate my viewers a lot and try my best to make interesting content as well to improve the quality of my videos. 🙂

@@CPUGalaxy No...no Thank you for your time and hard work to make such an amazing video us all!

It took me 2. Whats your point?

It's because this kind of compression simply removes data, which means the file won't be decompressed to the original bit rate. Instead, it'll play at lower quality

1996 pentuim 1? Would that play mpeg1vcd file? Or needed 1999 pentuim 3 for it? Or could 1995 486 with mpeg card 🤔 do it?

@@tripplefives1402 In the video the author was comparing MP3 Playes to computer CPUs, hence my comment...

I bought an old DX 33 in 1998 just to see how rubbish of a machine I could still use and be happy. I used it via remote desktop Xwindows in linux to my Pentium Pro 200 server I had in another room and doing that it was perfectly fine.. But you couldn't do much with it using it's own cpu even by 1998.