Apart from the odd coolness factor, an area where I see potential is as a modern 'SCC' for games. So, a game's music comes from some chip containing this MP3 player and another chip of several megabytes (32?) in size holds all the music. Then the only thing a programmer has to do is send some command to let the mp3-chip play/stop, additional commands for bass/treble/volume. This way there's no overhead for the games.

Looping music might be an issue tho, as mp3 can't loop without hickup iirc. For that I'd choose OGG instead.

Really GREAT news!! I will order 2 cards as soon as they are available!
I was already dreaming about a MP3 player for the CPC since years, but now it's great that it will come for the MSX.

I am very interested in supporting it in SymAmp (SymbOS), so I have a few questions:
- for the performance: How many OUTs (or LDs if memory mapped) do I need for sending one byte? (I hope one )
- what is the size of the internal buffer? (I am just wondering, how many times per second I need to re-fill the buffer)
- is the buffer divided into two parts (one part will be played, the other one has to be filled with new data), which are flipping? Or is it a rotating FIFO buffer?

I made a calculation, how much CPU usage a MP3 player would have on the CPC, when playing 128kbit MP3s from hard disc, and I came to a value of 25%, so it should be similiar or even faster on a normal MSX

What great can be use Symbos for hearing MP3 with SymAmp ^-^

@ Prodaton.
The Atmel and the VS1011 are doing the job, the MSX will be used to command the player.
If you wanna know some more about programming the Almel an VS1011 take a look at Yampp.com
It's a homebrew project, and the sourcecode is also available. iirc.
An other one isH-mpeg.de this one is using an other MP3 encoder, and hey, it's in your mopthers lang

yes, you are right, they do the decoding job, but I guess the MSX still has to transfer the MP3 data from HD to the card. Or I am wrong here?

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Apart from the odd coolness factor, an area where I see potential is as a modern 'SCC' for games. So, a game's music comes from some chip containing this MP3 player and another chip of several megabytes (32?) in size holds all the music. Then the only thing a programmer has to do is send some command to let the mp3-chip play/stop, additional commands for bass/treble/volume. This way there's no overhead for the games. Looping music might be an issue tho, as mp3 can't loop without hickup iirc. For that I'd choose OGG instead.

Wolf, maybe i add an SD card holder on it.
Then you can make MP3 sound/music cards and use them 4 games/aps etc.

Prodatron:
We need 7x256 out's (OTIR). There is an interupt when the MP3 decoder needs more data

More data about will come this week.

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Wolf, maybe i add an SD card holder on it.

Good idea, but you can also think of an CF connector, because they have an ide interface build in.

I just discover that thread.
I only can say one word: WOW!

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yes, you are right, they do the decoding job, but I guess the MSX still has to transfer the MP3 data from HD to the card. Or I am wrong here?

Correct.

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If you are interested, please let me know. Then we know how many we have to make, and what the price will be.

I'm interested. You should better put online a small site dedicated to this MSX cartridge so people can place preorders there.

Total Coolness!

If price isn't extremely high, I'd be very interested.

Really cool!

1) Does it run in a MSX1 or does it need MSX2/mapper/etc?
2) Will it be possible to use the cpu in the cartridge for other things besides playing mp3 (as a co-processor)? That would increase the value of this cartridge to the msx users.
3) What is the size of the buffer? It would be nice if it is not too small, so that msx can do other things besides sending data to the player. And if we want to use it with games, the overhead on the msx cpu can't be high.

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If the cart would have had a big ram to buffer entire songs it wouldn't been so impressive (its would be like connecting an ipod to the joystick port) but here you actually have the MSX play mp3's.

And that is.. practical? Imagine mp3's as backgroundmusic for a game (the hypothetical case I described above), is it practical that you loose some of your CPU to the playback of the mp3? -sorry, not a dvik post W_. -

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Prodatron: We need 7x256 out's (OTIR). There is an interupt when the MP3 decoder needs more data

So if I understand it correctly, the buffer has a size of 1793 bytes?
That would mean you have to refill it about 9times/second, so about every 10th vsync.
Is it also possible to detect the buffer status with an IN (would be hard to handle an additional interrupt in SymbOS).

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More data about will come this week.

Ok, great! Sorry for beeing so impatient, but I am just very interested

dvik: hit me, kick me, drown me .. [Edit] and [Reply] are so close to eachother, instead of replying to your post, I edited it Happened one time before, but then I was able to restore it, but this time I went back already in browser-history.. -sorry-