[Wizard] new to the list

[Cameron Patrick]

On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 03:14:38PM +0800, Bernard Blackham wrote:
| On Sat, Aug 30, 2003 at 03:08:30PM +0800, Mike Fineberg wrote:
| > I'll start off with how much I hate PC vs. *nix vs. Mac
| > discussions. They've been done to death for the past 20 years...
| 
| Nobody's going to stop you :)
| I'm actually more curious about how it'd come together under DOS, so
| I'd be intrigued to see the final result.

One potential pitfall is the sound "card" which is almost but not quite
SB16 compatible.  (It requires special drivers to work under Windows and
Linux; since AFAIK DOS doesn't have any kind of standard sound system it
depends on how happy your MP3 player app is.)

I was a bit concerned about how fast the CPU was for this kind of
system, so I did some comparisons.  The numbers: Decoding a file with a
playing time of 14:18.  Comparing my desktop vs the wizard:

File type		Athlon 2600		Wizard (233MHz)
- FLAC (89 mb)		0:06			3:44
- Vorbis (8.3 mb)	0:08			10:30
- MP3 (11 mb)		0:09			6:11

Even allowing some overhead for network or disk IO and writing stuff to
the sound card, it should work.  Interestingly Vorbis was marginally
faster to decode on the Athlon and a heck of a lot slower on the Wizard;
presumably this means that they're lousy at floating point.

Cameron.