On Mon, 7 Aug 2000 02:39:51 +0000, Howard Schwartz wrote:
Subject: What tempts you to upgrade?
> The one thing that currently tempts me towards is audio.
> There are some wonderful radio shows, lecture archives
> and such on the net that play in real audio. When I tried
> what I could find in real audio for dos, the sites
> complained that they would only play with a late version
> of real audio -- one that does not exist to my knowledge
> for dos. I suspect similar problems may be true for mpeg
> audio.
IMHO both MPEG (audio and video) and MP3 (audio layer) are
not a problem with "true" SurvPCs.
For MPEG: The only thing required is a decent MPEG card.
This way, what your PC has to do is just transferring data
to the card, all the decoding and decompressing processes
are done in the card's processor independently. Leaving
the burden from your not-so-powerful CPU. There shouldn't
be a problem playing *.MPG files, even with a lowly 286.
But to play Video CD smoothly, you will also need at least
a 2x CD-ROM drive.
For MP3: There's no MP3 card I know of. But with a little
hobby-electronics experiments, you might able to built a
homebrew MP3 player, that feeded directly from (i.e.) your
PC's parallel port. There are plenty of MP3 player schematic
diagrams and "knock-down" kits floating around the net.
> it appears I need a faster processor, more ram, and some
> version of winblows or perhaps linux -- if I want to listen
> to various audio clips.
Yes, but only if you do everything in software, just like
the infamous Winmodem ;-) The only audio thing that really
unusable on SurvPCs probably just Real Audio. Due to the
propetiary format, there's no hardware decompressor exist
(AFAIK). So, decompressing should be done in software level,
which do need faster processor and lots of RAM.
> I wonder what others might want to do that they simply can
> not accomplish on survpcs? That is, what are the temtations
> for you all to upgrade?
Heavy graphics apps (including games and VR), Windoze apps
development, and almost everything that related to W2K ;-)
--Eko
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