Re: Pictures of Tilburg 2001 (today) added to site

[Pablo Vasques Bravo-Villalba]

Maarten ter Huurne wrote:
> I had that feeling too; the connection between MPEG and MSX is still unclear
> to me...

They're not directly related as Mr. Nishi himselft admitted,
but there's a small connection. I can't tell the truth about
MPEG, Nishi, ASCII and such, but I can tell a short story
about MSX in Brazil.

In the early nineties, I couldn't believe it was possible to
have one minute of music stored in just a few hundred kilobytes.
It sounded completely outlandish to me. However, an acquaintance
of me and some friends in Brazil did achieve that with MSX.
I was very skeptical and had no idea of how he did it, but
later on I started to understand. What could be the underlying
ideas? It was as follows:

1) MSX doesn't have much memory. Therefore, we must use
   some kind of compression;
2) MSX doesn't have much clock power. Therefore, we must
   use some fair decompression scheme and optimize it for
   current MSX hardware speed.

Obviously, those two ideas have something to do with MPEG audio.

For example, with MPEG Layer-3 you can have 4 minutes per
megabyte of 11KHz audio. One minute of sound fits easily in
256KBytes -- not too unusual in the MSX world. MPEG Layer-3
in that bitrate can be uncompressed in real time in a machine
with a generic x86 processor with only 25MHz (or less), and
Layer-2 and Layer-1 were much lighter.

Of course, this acquaintace of ours didn't use MPEG, but
some concepts were similar. Today, we have MUST and VIP by
Ricardo Bittencourt and everyone with an MSX can see this
could be done.

Perhaps Nishi meant that he had some idea like this (not
completely original, because there were already some people
studying these issues back then) and tried to implement it
broadly in some way, and later saw some similarities with
this and MPEG... But of course I wouldn't put my hand on
fire for this. =)

[]s,

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