Thursday, 02 May 2019
Will Winamp play MP3 on a 486?
Old, old,old. Of course, Yes it will. You will probably need to change some options to get it to play well. For example, go to the mainmenu / Visualization / Visualization Mode and select «Off» – this will turn off the scope / analyzer display in the Winamp window, which will save some CPU. Perhaps more importantly go to Options / Preferences and select Input in the left window and then select Nullsoft MPEG audio decoder in the right window and press the Configure button. Try changing «Decoder Mode» to 486, K5, non-MMX instead of Pentium or Pentium Pro. Also try setting the Quality to Half or Quarter. If you set enough of these options down, Winamp will certainly play MP3 fine on a 486. OTOH setting the options down *will* decrease the quality of the sound, so the trick is not to reduce more than you have to. Get rid of the visualisation first. Also right click on the song title on the main menu and uncheck «Autoscroll song title» in the pop-up menu – this will also save a bit of CPU, and every little helps.
