Okay, I have a question that might be dumb, but then again I dunno... well, why exactly is it that mp3's can't be played in qbasic? is is because of of speed? like seriously i would like to know because i wanna know if pursuing it would be futile or what... some1 help me out here :???:
I hear it's mostly because of memory requirements - 640k isn't enough. Speed is also probably an issue.
I think that because mp3's are are small and have good quality
then it must be quite compressed and then you need to decopress
it in realtime and that probably takes much speed...
Yeah, but mainly memory. You have to build lots of tables that take heaps of memory.
hey thanx, yall. but damn though
Probably because no one has tried it yet...
diroga, i had already read that thread... but plasma used mpxplay... not qb. (qb was only for menus and song selection (front end)) i was wondering about qb as the actual 'workhorse' of the operation, u know? im reading up on it. really i just want to use mp3s in a game, but i think that may be impossible, because even if qb can handle mp3s, it seems like it wouldnt be able to process graphics and ordinary game algorithms at the same time. well, theres research to be done. i was really just interested if anyone actually tried it yet. evryone seems pretty pessimistic about it though
regardless i luv the challenge. adi
Quote: I used QB for the front-end (menus, song selection, etc), but for actually playing the MP3s, I used MPXPlay. I wrote a TSR in C to monitor/control the program.
MPXPlay is a DOS32 app you can find at
http://mpxplay.cjb.net/
So the only QB part in Plasma's box is the user interface...
MPXplay claims it can run in a 486DX2 with 4 meg, so probably a simple QB player could be made for a modern PC(with the help of DQB or UGL sound modules).
The biggest problems i see are:
-Timing. All things must run at a regular pace.. In W2000 or XP dos is run at very irregular intervals.
-Windows does'nt support sound cards in DOS anymore. So we should use VDMSound.
-Translating the mp3 spec into something understandable
(maybe the hardest one)
cha0s:
Check DS4QB++. As it actually interfaces QB with Windows Media API, mp3 files are not excluded in principle. (I never checked it)