I was a fan of the Cyrix line of processors when I first started playing with free Unixes like NetBSD. They didn't have the bugs of the early Pentiums, were worlds more affordable, and have very respectable integer performance, which is quite useful for Unix.
I had one of these. It was a P90, clocked at 90 MHz, but which claimed to be the perf equivalent of an Intel Pentium at 100Mhz. You can see these "P" numbers in the wikipedia article. From what I remember it worked fine, but I mostly used that PC to screw around with Slackware and work on my CS assignments.
Did you try using the MAD MP3 decoder, which only relied on fixed point? I remember trying it several times and comparing the audio output to the other decoders and wondering what the deal was. I had a Pentium though and didn't know enough about floating point to understand the issue.
I was a fan of the Cyrix line of processors when I first started playing with free Unixes like NetBSD. They didn't have the bugs of the early Pentiums, were worlds more affordable, and have very respectable integer performance, which is quite useful for Unix.
I had one of these. It was a P90, clocked at 90 MHz, but which claimed to be the perf equivalent of an Intel Pentium at 100Mhz. You can see these "P" numbers in the wikipedia article. From what I remember it worked fine, but I mostly used that PC to screw around with Slackware and work on my CS assignments.
I had one in that era, they sucked for whatever opcodes mp3 decoding required
Did you try using the MAD MP3 decoder, which only relied on fixed point? I remember trying it several times and comparing the audio output to the other decoders and wondering what the deal was. I had a Pentium though and didn't know enough about floating point to understand the issue.
https://www.underbit.com/products/mad/