I thought that SB128 and 040 can play mp3s!!!

[Karlos]

I thought, that playing mp3s with a soundcard is not so CPU time consuming! I almost got better results playing mp3s through Paula years ago..

I guess you thought wrong, then. All the soundcard does for you is to give you a better DAC. It *might* even accelerate some mixing stuff, depending on the driver and hardware.

One problem you might have is AHI. This can take some configuring for optimal performance. Its probably old news, but every version I tried after 4.12 (basically any AHI v5 revision I tested) sucked the life out of my CPU, no matter what I did with the settings - and that was just using paula for output.

I would hope that current versions are somewhat better in that regard, I've not updated it as I don't have a soundcard.

IMO it is the mpega.library problem.. is there any other possibility or should I try a newer version?

This could also be part of your problem. Frankly mp3 decoding can be heavy work for a 680x0. There were integer versions of this library that are supposed to be a lot faster if you don't have a 68060.

[Karlos]

JJ wrote:
are there PPC verions of the mpega library and could I expect to be able to play MP3's at full quality through paula or does the old context switching rear its ugly head?

Yes there are. And you only get context switches for each chunk thats loaded, decoded and fed to ahi, which if you use anything more than 64KB is never an issue in my experience.

I find playing 44kHz mp3 via ppc on 3.x no problem. AHI was almost always the bottleneck (until I dropped back to v4)

[Karlos]

Piru wrote:

A1200 Mediator has no DMA to amiga system memory, it's all CPU poking and peeking.

Cue the resident elbox fanboy ;-)