Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Captain Ned
ludi wrote:I'm surprised it was able to do FLAC decoding even close to realtime. I had a Cyrix 5x86-100 in my first college computer. Couldn't do MP3s in realtime unless I reduced the output quality and didn't use the computer for anything else at the same time.
ludi wrote:I'm surprised it was able to do FLAC decoding even close to realtime. I had a Cyrix 5x86-100 in my first college computer. Couldn't do MP3s in realtime unless I reduced the output quality and didn't use the computer for anything else at the same time.
Legend wrote:ludi wrote:I'm surprised it was able to do FLAC decoding even close to realtime. I had a Cyrix 5x86-100 in my first college computer. Couldn't do MP3s in realtime unless I reduced the output quality and didn't use the computer for anything else at the same time.
Isn't there much less decoding to do with FLAC than MP3? I thought simply getting the entire file transferred from disk in less than the play time is the issue. I remember standard audio CD's being played on a 486 with no issue. Is this not similar to FLAC from a harddisk?
Ifalna wrote:It also had the advantage that you could put the games CD in a conventional CD player and listen to the soundtrack.
ozzuneoj wrote:Ifalna wrote:It also had the advantage that you could put the games CD in a conventional CD player and listen to the soundtrack.
Until 1996 or so, the vast majority of games used MIDI music since it required so little processing power, RAM and storage... with one sticking point being that the actual sound of the music was highly dependent on the hardware or software available to the user. A midi track played on an FM chip on an old Sound Blaster clone may sound neat, or horrible, or anything in between, where as the same midi file played on a Roland SC55 Sound Module through a sound card's gameport midi interface would sound amazingly different (probably as the composer intended.
Anything that didn't use MIDI was generally using Red Book CD audio, though there were later games that used MOD music, which I'm less familiar with, and as far as I know would have required more processing power than CD audio or MIDI (since it uses digital samples stored in the audio file and creates a song out of them... basically)... I'm pretty sure it used less disk space than CD or Wav audio though. I think the Command and Conquer series used this method, as the music worked without the disk if you copied files from the CD, but it was definitely not midi and the files weren't large enough to be uncompressed high-sample-rate wavs.
I love this era of game audio.
just brew it! wrote:IIRC MP3 decoding worked on a K6-2, but took a non-trivial percentage of the CPU.
The Egg wrote:A decompressed FLAC would essentially be a WAV, and require 64-128MB to be stored in RAM, which is substantially more than most 486's ever saw (didn't they use 72-pin SIMMs?)
The Egg wrote:Edit: After thinking about it, not sure it matters. A decompressed FLAC would essentially be a WAV, and require 64-128MB to be stored in RAM, which is substantially more than most 486's ever saw (didn't they use 72-pin SIMMs?)
just brew it! wrote:The Egg wrote:Edit: After thinking about it, not sure it matters. A decompressed FLAC would essentially be a WAV, and require 64-128MB to be stored in RAM, which is substantially more than most 486's ever saw (didn't they use 72-pin SIMMs?)
Why would the entire thing need to be stored in RAM? Even modern media players on systems with GBs of RAM don't do that; they decode it as needed on the fly and stream it to the audio interface.
Scrotos wrote:Most notable game that used MODs that I know of is Star Control 2. UT2004 had a composer that was decent in the MOD community but I think they used OGGs.
If you wanted good sound quality, the DAC on the Pro Audio Spectrum 16 (PAS-16) was reputed to be good along with the super expensive Turtle Beach cards.
If you want some fun and like messing with config.sys, look up mod demos or the demo scene. You can see some cool stuff rendered in realtime on your system where your video card can even make a difference. Like, one demo offers cooler effects if it detects a Diamond Stealth24 for hicolor DOS mode.
Legend wrote:Isn't there much less decoding to do with FLAC than MP3? I thought simply getting the entire file transferred from disk in less than the play time is the issue. I remember standard audio CD's being played on a 486 with no issue. Is this not similar to FLAC from a harddisk?
bthylafh wrote:I had a Packard Bell, originally 486SX-33 and upgraded to a Pentium-83 Overdrive, no secondary cache. I seem to recall Winamp having trouble playing MP3s but if I booted into Debian 2.1 and used Freeamp (later renamed to Zinf and abandoned) on the console it'd play without stuttering.
The Egg wrote:Yeap. The MIDI instrumentation was entirely dependent on the card, and could either sound amazing or incredibly cheesy. We had a Soundblaster AWE32, which was probably among the best available, and put all others (that I tried) to shame. I remember using it to listen to MIDI files of classical music on Compton's encyclopedia.
As far as the original topic.....a 486 should be able to play uncompressed WAVs just fine. Decoding MP3 would probably be too much, and FLAC I'm not sure (though I would expect less overhead than MP3). How much RAM does the machine in question have? Anyone know if FLAC files are generally decoded entirely into RAM during playback, or just read in realtime from the source?
jackbomb wrote:That spectrum graph is probably using a sizeable chunk of CPU time, especially since it looks like it's updating at 30Hz. If you disable it, you might be able to play FLAC and MP3s on it, depending on the type of 486. I'm sure someone will correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe FLAC uses integer based decoding and MP3 uses floating point (so a DX2 or DX4 would be required).
Sounds awesome even through my modest setup. What kind of subwoofers are those?
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.
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.
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?
The Egg wrote:Did 486's have PCI?