Uncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.

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zorked an hour ago | parent | next [-]

For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono.

	▲	Sesse__ 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		MP3 decoders have, thankfully, gotten faster since the 90s. But yes, a 66MHz is pushing it indeed.

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danielheath 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.

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orhmeh09 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

I never noticed any problems, but I did have the mmx version. It wasn't fast but never did the playback stutter , even with dreamweaver and several browser windows

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Espressosaurus 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Yeah, I remember an mp3 rating >50% CPU time on one of those early pentiums we had

	▲	vanviegen an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah. Seeing that made me very happy, being the proud owner of a dual CPU (no, not dual core!) AMD K6. :-)

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stevekemp an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better!

	▲	somat 30 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The turbo button was always on, or it should be. you would turn it off to downgrade your pc to run at the speed of the original IBM PC in the mostly vain hope that whatever old game that was programmed for that exact speed would start to run right. It was slightly be fore my time(we had a 286 with the button, but I was to young to be curious about it) Would the pc take the speed change without problems or was it best to reboot? I sort of hate whatever marketing genius figured out to label it "Turbo" instead of "Slow" But they definitely earned their bonus. The real weird one from that era was the 7 segment led MHz displays that were popular in the 386/486 era. It was weird because the the chips could not change speed in the first place. And I don't want to say every system was like this, but every one I ever saw was set by a set of static jumpers or a dip switch. When you upgraded your cpu you put the little sticker that came with it on the chassis and changed the jumpers, they served the same purpose.