[Coco] Some CoCo ideas to ponder...

[Gene Heskett]

On Sunday 08 February 2004 06:33, Bob Emery wrote:
>Okay, I lost track of the 512 byte sector thread when my inbox hit
> 300 (unread). Seems the concensus was that the CoCo should be able
> to handle this. Would it be possible to make a patch for Basic to
> switch between 256 or 512 byte sectors, possibly by a switch hidden
> in the directory? Is that a catch-22? I'm thinking that lowering
> the number of granules by half would allow smaller GAT and thus
> easier access to 80 track drives under Basic. (No need to relocate
> the table...?)
>
>Next question... I'm sure I'm not the first to wonder if the CoCo
> can play MP3s. Specifically (I want to be realistic here) could it
> play a 32Kbps encoded mono MP3 and sound about as good as my cell
> phone playing the same MP3 (as a ringer)? Would there be any
> possibility of the MP3 size not being limited to RAM size? Granted,
> hard disk would be preferred over floppy for this, and so in RSDOS
> disk size is the limiting factor... could the MP3 span a few HD
> drives?
>
>cheers,
>Bob

The decodeing horsepower required for an mp3 would probably render 
that to be a 2 step process with only the playback of the decoded 
data being done in real time.  One would, if its any bigger than the 
ring file on a cellphone, have to first decode it to a cache file, 
and then play the cache file.  The decoding would take a coco several 
times the time that the realtime playing would.  That said, its just 
an opinion based on how much cpu xmms uses here, I have no other hard 
facts to back that up.

Besides, sonicly, ogg beats mp3 in any same data rate listening tests 
so far, and ogg is free, src code for both the encoder and the player 
can be downloaded.  When I rip one of my cd's here, it always gets 
ogg'd at about Q6 or Q7 and the playback can be a/b'd with the cd 
without hearing any diffs.  Although I have "carhart notches" 100+ db 
deep in my hearing, the rest of the range is still fairly "golden" 
even as I approach the end of the 70th orbit around the sun.

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-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.