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Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by userbinator on Thursday August 16, 2018 @10:21PM (#17779872)
20MHz is not a lot, but a DSP is quite different from a regular CPU, so I wonder if it's powerful enough for decoding low-bitrate MP3...
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by rasz on Friday August 17, 2018 @12:27AM (#17780287)
A big maybe. While 20MHz TMS32010 DSP in 1985 was around 386DX 33MHz horsepower wise, if you ignore things like single cycle 16x16 multiply(10-20 faster than 386), it might still be too slow. For comparison ~3x faster DSP56001 in Atari Falcon needs 16MHz CPU assist to decode MP3.
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by einr on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:52AM (#17780788)
Comparing to a general purpose CPU, I remember from the olden days that a 486 DX4/100 was just BARELY able to decode stereo MP3's if you used a well optimized MS-DOS playback program. In a multitasking environment like Windows -- forget about it!
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by madengr on Friday August 17, 2018 @08:22AM (#17782226)
Windows back then wan’t multitasking. OS/2 on the other hand; I could download at 9600 baud and play Wolfenstein at the same time.
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by einr on Monday August 20, 2018 @06:24AM (#17798829)
I ran Windows 95 on my 486.
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by rasz on Friday August 17, 2018 @03:04AM (#17780851)
DSP56001 powered Atari Falcon can also "run" Quake 2 :)

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLNs6Jw4V4vlvafSs0H3Ww...

Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by Zardoz84 on Friday August 17, 2018 @02:22AM (#17780672)
ummm... and a TMS32030 ? I have one old 16 bit ISA card that was some kind of videotoaster with it.
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by rasz on Friday August 17, 2018 @03:01AM (#17780840)
33Mflops, plenty fast, probably used for hardware encoding CIF/QCIF MPEG1/MJPEG in real time. Now you just need someone to write you that decoder :)
Re:A Sound Card Before Its Time by Zardoz84 on Friday August 17, 2018 @04:20PM (#17785381)
TMS32020 with 1MiB form a Coreco Oculus f64 board