Reply 20 of 49, by RiP
- Rank
- Member
wrote:Even a 286 or 386 should have no issue playing 44kHz WAVs if it can read them from disk & DMA them to the sound card fast enough. Playing a WAV file is not CPU intensive if you have DMA.
It's when you get into mixing or resampling that it starts bogging down the CPU, and if you're using something like Media Player in Windows 9x, it's doing that. Try from the DOS command line - it should be no sweat.
wrote:I had hard time playing WAVs on a PC104 module based on AMD Elan520 (133MHz 5x86), and simply because it only had PIO HDD access. Playing over built in PCI 100Mbit network was fine though. MP3s weren't a problem on that board though sometimes there was stutter here or there when doing other things.
Well, I used an IDE VIA VT6421A busmaster card but it made no difference.
The main problem was my Asus PCI-USB2 (NEC controller) 😵
After removing it, I could play MP3 128K @ 44KHz stereo on my AMD 5x86 133@160MHz with Winamp (CPU:100%)
But playing WAV still takes 50-60% of the CPU. Anyway to stop Windows from mixing or resampling? 😕
Also possible to tweak the system to work faster?