BinaryDemon wrote:I haven’t tried on vintage hardware but mpxplay (dos) claims it only needs a dx4-100 for mp3 playback
Indeed it will work, as I have done it on my own 486 build, a near-exact recreation of my previously-mentioned childhood system. As I recall though, I needed to download a special version of mpxplay optimized specifically for the 486 to get it to play properly. Of course, turning off Turbo immediately murders it. 🤣
I was also able to find an MP3 player (Can't remember the name, but it was not WinAmp) that worked adequately under Win95 on that system, but I had to disable stereo playback (didn't need to re-encode the MP3 files, just a settings change in the player), and it had trouble playing any MP3s higher than ~256kbps (it'll play them without skipping...just not at the right speed).
As a semi-related aside, I'd say my Compaq Presario 2200 with a Cyrix MediaGX 180 is the absolute slowest system I have capable of playing back MP3s without any issues under Windows. Figured it's semi-related since the first-gen MediaGX is basically nothing more than a souped-up 5x86, which itself is just a faster 486.