Would be cool if someone made a universal decoder card, mp3, mpeg, etc maybe put a pi or fpga on it to emulate these old decoder cards.

mp3 playing chips are $2 with free shipping, look up DFplayer Mini, here whole jukebox based on one driven by arduino https://github.com/jandelgado/carl https://github.com/ghmartin77/DFPlayerAnalyzer you talk to it over 5V 9600 serial
biggest limitation - can only play from CF card, add CH375 Lo-tech ISA USB Adapter and a mechanism to switch CF card between being connectod to one or the other and you have whole design completed

Now in possession..
Just have to get some time to test it out on my 386.

feipoa wrote on 2022-10-21, 03:04:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-21, 02:47:

How do I find them on ebay?

You don't. They all gone. There were only two units. We will need to let someone else do the testing, preferably on a slow system in DOS, Win3.1, W95, and I hope NT 3.51 and NT 4.0.

It'd be great if someone can figure out how to get it working in a compatible Amiga as well.

bifo86 wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:50:

feipoa wrote on 2022-10-21, 03:04:

Sphere478 wrote on 2022-10-21, 02:47:

How do I find them on ebay?

You don't. They all gone. There were only two units. We will need to let someone else do the testing, preferably on a slow system in DOS, Win3.1, W95, and I hope NT 3.51 and NT 4.0.

It'd be great if someone can figure out how to get it working in a compatible Amiga as well.

All you need is a bridgeboard in a big box Amiga. I have an A2000 and A4000 I'm going to test it with, once the GG2+ bridgeboard replica is released.

Removed the 3rd party stickers.. It actually is a legit NSM TrueSound. 😄

I'm guessing nobody is interested in decoding MP3s offline into raw PCM and then playing back the raw PCM from disk...? I presume that would be the size of the equivalent CD track. Yes, that's a lot of space, yes, you can play your music in real time without stuttering, unlike before. Probably for free and not requiring any dedicated hardware.

Still. The hardware is cool. Any chance of hacking an early Winamp version to support one of these cards...?

wiretap wrote on 2022-11-02, 00:32:

Removed the 3rd party stickers.. It actually is a legit NSM TrueSound. 😄

It certainly looked like the NSM card with the stickers on!

Yea I looked identical, just all the NSM stuff covered up.

As far as Winamp support, I'm sure a plugin could be coded for it.

r00tb33r wrote on 2022-11-02, 09:47:

I'm guessing nobody is interested in decoding MP3s offline into raw PCM and then playing back the raw PCM from disk...? I presume that would be the size of the equivalent CD track. Yes, that's a lot of space, yes, you can play your music in real time without stuttering, unlike before. Probably for free and not requiring any dedicated hardware.

Still. The hardware is cool. Any chance of hacking an early Winamp version to support one of these cards...?

IMHO, one can stick to uncompressed formats as there is no need to bother with MP3 on old systems in the current day.
Disk space is cheap and it is easy to add huge amounts of it to a vintage system with XTIDE BIOS. Using network storage is another option. Period correctness aficionados may draw the line at using modern-ish large drives/SSD/CF/SD in any case, or using any kind of modern re-implentation of a hardware decoder.

I can't deny the potential coolness factor of using a vintage device for MP3 decoding, however.

On another note, I wonder how much CPU power is required for realtime FLAC decoding.

I read somewhere OPUS decoder can work on arm clocked at ~30MHz, that would probably translate to 100MHz pentium.

wiretap wrote on 2022-11-02, 00:32:

Removed the 3rd party stickers.. It actually is a legit NSM TrueSound. 😄

PXL_20221102_002319727.jpg

PXL_20221102_002333139.jpg

So cool.

I cannot believe I missed out by literal *days* in getting one of these. I have wanted one for years and I just pulled my 386 out of storage yesterday 🤣. *sighs*

If you ever want to sell it… 😀

helf wrote on 2022-11-11, 02:38:

So cool. […]
Show full quote

wiretap wrote on 2022-11-02, 00:32:

Removed the 3rd party stickers.. It actually is a legit NSM TrueSound. ^_^

PXL_20221102_002319727.jpg

PXL_20221102_002333139.jpg

So cool.

I cannot believe I missed out by literal *days* in getting one of these. I have wanted one for years and I just pulled my 386 out of storage yesterday lol. *sighs*

If you ever want to sell it… :)

If it makes you feel any better, you didn't just miss out. There was only one more card available after the first poster mentioned it, and that last one was gone within hours. You never had a chance!

feipoa wrote on 2022-11-11, 06:38:

If it makes you feel any better, you didn't just miss out. There was only one more card available after the first poster mentioned it, and that last one was gone within hours. You never had a chance!

Oh, well in that case I feel great xD