Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Captain Ned
The Egg wrote:Krogoth wrote:The Egg wrote:Now I'm wondering....what's the most modern OS capable of running on a 486, assuming you could get enough RAM into it? I know that I had XP running on a few machines that had no business running it.
Does the 486 have PCI or VLB buses on it?
Did 486's have PCI? Hmmm....the first PC which was my very own was an AMD 5x86 133mhz. I'm pretty sure that was just a glorified 486, and I'm pretty sure the board had PCI.
Anyhow, assume the best case scenario. Best board, and maxed out RAM. I believe I ran XP on an original Pentium 166 MMX. What about Lubuntu or some other flavor of Linux?
The Egg wrote:Anyhow, assume the best case scenario. Best board, and maxed out RAM. I believe I ran XP on an original Pentium 166 MMX. What about Lubuntu or some other flavor of Linux?
bfg-9000 wrote:Damn Small Linux (Debian) is probably as good as it's going to get. Comes with XMMS MP3 player but I wouldn't expect 128kbps MP3s to play without a Pentium Overdrive as most MP3 decoders are heavily floating point and the 486's FPU just wasn't powerful enough--in DOSamp it required a Pentium 60. There was the libmad plugin for Winamp that did integer-only MP3 decoding but the 486's integer performance wasn't good enough either...
Krogoth wrote:Does the 486 have PCI or VLB buses on it?
Wirko wrote:What's the sample rate and bit depth of the FLACs in question? The burden of sample rate conversion from, say, 96/24 to 44/16 could be quite heavy and it probably requires floating point math.
wingless wrote:My Retro brothers! I must ask that you all join the 'RETRO Machines' Facebook group which has most of the well known retro YouTubers as members. I have every generation of CPU from the 286 to Core 2 series. I also have a, a bunch of Sound Blasters, a Roland SC-55 MIDI synth, and even a brand new Dreamblaster X1 MIDI module from Serdashop.
We have much to discuss!!
Dysthymia wrote:Not that I ever owned one, but I've been led to believe that Roland had the best MIDI sound back in the day.
Chuckaluphagus wrote:bfg-9000 wrote:Damn Small Linux (Debian) is probably as good as it's going to get. Comes with XMMS MP3 player but I wouldn't expect 128kbps MP3s to play without a Pentium Overdrive as most MP3 decoders are heavily floating point and the 486's FPU just wasn't powerful enough--in DOSamp it required a Pentium 60. There was the libmad plugin for Winamp that did integer-only MP3 decoding but the 486's integer performance wasn't good enough either...
With Windows 95 running on a 486 DX4/100, you could play 128 kbps MP3s using an integer decoder. You couldn't do anything else at the same time, but it could just barely handle it. I know this from having set it up on a friend's computer in the dorms, 18 years ago.
setaG_lliB wrote:Chuckaluphagus wrote:With Windows 95 running on a 486 DX4/100, you could play 128 kbps MP3s using an integer decoder. You couldn't do anything else at the same time, but it could just barely handle it. I know this from having set it up on a friend's computer in the dorms, 18 years ago.
Was there any loss of sound quality using an integer decoder?
Dysthymia wrote:Not that I ever owned one, but I've been led to believe that Roland had the best MIDI sound back in the day.