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Comment by bdcravens | Hacker News Reader

I had a 486DX - if I wanted to play an MP3, I had to exit out of everything and run only the DOS player.

On my 486 I don't remember being able to play MP3s in realtime. I remember having to convert a 3MB MP3 to a 50MB WAV that took up my whole HDD just to play it.

Ken Silverman, creator of the BUILD Engine, made MP3PC.exe that's still hosted on his Utilities page. I'm pretty sure I used this on a 486 years ago and was surprised at how well it worked, though it apparently is picky about MP3 encodings. From the description:

> MP3PC.EXE (73,483 bytes): Got no sound card? MP3PC plays MP3 files through your PC speaker! For some reason I like to make programs work through the PC speaker. Some people still don't know that it's possible to play real sounds through it. Unfortunately, you must run this in pure DOS mode for it to work.

His Utilities page can be found at: http://advsys.net/ken/utils.htm

There were entire games, eg. star control 2, that played sample audio through the PC speaker. It included voice sample in parts (eg. The pkunk swear words).

It was actually patented by Access Software, under the name of RealSound. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RealSound

What a dumb patent. We were already doing this before their patent. We just ignored it and they didn't try to challenge. I remember talking to my EE father at the time and he said the idea of doing PWM for audio was obvious and ludicrous to patent.

Wow, I just learned that he is also the author of PNGOut.

I had a 486 dx4/100 there was a checkbox in winamp options you needed to tick in order to be able to play mp3's, I've long since forgotten what it was labelled but when you checked the tickbox it worked and audio played correctly but basically pegged the entire cpu - forget about skipping or being able to seek within the track. Just moving mouse cursor etc. was massively delayed the whole computer was unusable until the track finished playing.

My next computer after the dx4 was a Pentium 166 MHZ - it could play mp3's and Quake simultaneously.

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