I am far from being an MSX expert, but as youtube descriptions says, it's with GFX9000: http://www.msx.org/wiki/GFX9000

Of course, I looked only and not saw ...



But ... we talking about SymbOS like it supports CPC,MSX and soon EP ... but in MSX it supports such subversions of that hardware, like that cartridge ... and more versions of CPC ... and so ... this SymbOS thing is quite advanced I feel ... so I want to say ... It is even bigger than I thought it is ...

But ... we talking about SymbOS like it supports CPC,MSX and soon EP ... but in MSX it supports such subversions of that hardware, like that cartridge ... and more versions of CPC ... and so ... this SymbOS thing is quite advanced I feel ... so I want to say ... It is even bigger than I thought it is ...

Well, at least now there is some reason to have: turbo EP (done), big-memory EP (done), external video cartridge thingy like GFX9000 (not done yet). Before, everybody told, that it's useless to create a more powerful Nick, or anything like that, but if SymbOS can use it, maybe there is some value of those projects anyway. And btw, for high resoluton 16 colour mode, it is still possible to utilize somehow the EXTCOL inputs of EP with some additional hardware which would allow even "mix" traditional Nick graphics and "new style" graphics by the "old" hardware.

About the MP3: it's not so easy to decode by software, so I doubt Z80 can do it On PCs, something like 40MHz 486 systems could play 32kbs mono MP3s and such (or Amiga 1200 with CPU accelerator cards with clocs about 30MHz). For more sane audio quality it was better to think about the Pentium class CPUs already. MP3 decoding is quite FPU heavy stuff. I don't know if some specialized "integer only" solutions (like the "libmad" on Linux which mplayer could use as well - I was an mplayer developer but it was a long time ago ...) would help, but even if it does, it's for sure too much for a Z80 even at higher clock speeds. But as I've linked some URLs above, there are nice (even not so expensive) single chip decoders, it's a more realistic way to play MP3s on 8 bit micros anyway. And again the youtube title of the video also tells about the Mp3 decoder which is meant (I think) as a hardware decoder, not software ...

I also think. And want to see the details! Enterprise have a stereo sound input at the expansion bus...

Google is our friend, a simple search and: http://www.pa4den.nl/MP3opMSX.html
Btw, it's funny that it seems some IC like what I've already written about some posts ago, it's not even too expensive, but needs SPI (well that once is something about I2C, bit confusing) bus it seems (like the SD card btw, and also that mentioned wifi module ... we would need a generic SPI interface not just for SD ...)

SD interface have a memory mapped I/O, and have a fast read mode when the bytes of the sector can be copied with LDIR.

Okay, and what about the encoded sound stream ? Does the extra hardware push that to an additional DAC, or Z80 mixes/plays that to some MSX/CPC DAC ?

EP has 2 channel (left,right) 6 bit DAC ...

This is probably up to a potential hardware producer, if he provides an external additional jack (like for the MSX) or leads the sound signal into the EP, if this is possible.

@Prodatron, What is the trigger when or why you begin to support a produced hardware extension for a supported hardware platform ?

Or do you (SymbOS) offer HAL or driver interfaces to implement SymbOS drivers for the different hardware extensions ?

And how do these hardware drivers become a part of SymbOS ? Do the driver writers give you versions and you integrate those in the SymbOS distributions ?

Prodatron is too modest to say so, but he buys pretty much all the cool hardware and supports it in Symbos. If an Enterprising Enterprise user created an MP3 hardware decoder or Ethernet, prodatron would soon have a driver so it could be used.