Hi All,

  I have an old(er) computer, that has trouble playing mp3 files and doing
other stuff at the same time (especially games, etc.) I tried various 
players, but they all use 10-20% CPU power. That is a lot. So, I had the
idea of having a hardware decoder inside the PC, that would do all the 
work. Luckily, I have unused ISA slots on my motherboard. Plus, I have
a free stereo sound input on my soundcard!

So, I thought I might put an mp3 decoder chip, some RAM (probably DRAM,
since it's so cheap, and I have a few MB lying around here and there),
and some programmable logic to be the glue between the bus, the decoder
and the memory bank. Then, I would have a small piece of software that
would retrieve chunks of mp3 files, buffer them on the decoder card, and
control things such as play, pause, next, prev., etc.

However, this would involve quite a lot of work. I tried to find similar
projects on the net, but I have found none. I did find hundreds of 'first
ever portable mp3 player!!!', but they are all based on memory devices
or IDE drives. That is not what I am looking for. Surprisingly, even the
PICLIST archive turned up nothing.

Has anyone heard of such a thing?


Christian
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