MAS-Player Review

But being a humble miggy user our machines can play such files, but with some sacrifice, with such a small amount of chip-fast RAM that the Amiga has at it's disposal compared to the PC users our poor machines struggle to play MP3's mods of 2-3Mb or over, well, such mods take up so much CPU (Central Processing Unit) time up, that if we want to run other stuff we're stuffed, but then, maybe not.

Enter MAS-Player from Eyetech, now, for any of you who don't know what MAS- Player is it's basically a Chip called a MAS 3507D and with it's relevant circuitry wired onto a small board and fitted into a standard 25-pin D-type plug which in turn plugs into the printer parallel port of our miggy.

The MAS-Player takes all the strain out of the decoding task for the miggy's CPU leaving it free for other function while at the same time allowing the user to play MP3's in full quality stereo output.

Now, the MAS-Player is a two-part piece of hardware kit, one part (the main guts) fits into the parallel port, there's a small 3.3mm stereo jack socket fitted to the main unit, the 2nd part of the kit is yet another 25-pin D-Type plug that plugs into the serial port, this plug just draws power from the serial port to power the whole kit, there's two MAS-Player models around, they are more or less the same, except for the first models serial port plug had no through connector, thus making the serial port unusable with the MAS-Player fitted.

However, Eyetech now supply a modified unit with a through- connector on the serial port making that particular port to available for whatever use.

I was in the process of deciding whether or not to get one, but many thanks to our Web Master Steve Evans for his kind offer in lending me his own MAS- Player (1st model) for a trial run, my verdict, yep, I'll definitely have one, or, owing to the fact as Steve says in his own words "I hardly ever use mine" (which is a totally different story than I've heard....hmm) I might be lucky to be offered to buy the one from Steve, if so, that'll do for me. Now, an alternative to the £70 price-tag for the MAS-Player hardware is a software MP3 player called Prayer which having used it is almost as good in a sort of software way, however, Prayer has to use the miggy's CPU time for playing, hence, you can't do much on your miggy while playing MP3's, so the MAS-Player is a far better alterative, and even for £70 I reckon is worth every penny, I've got so bored with normal music mods, MP3's are actual records.

Having used the MAS-Player now for a little while now, I've dead chuffed with it's capabilities for such a small piece of hardware, however, with a graphics card which will give you an added 16-32Mb of extra ChipRAM, even MAS- Player has got it's limitations, whilst running MAS-Player and a decent player GUI such as AmigaAMP and of course playing some good 60's-70's MP3's and trying to run either Protext or Wordworth 7 in order to carry on with writing some Crypt articles while having a nice few mods playing in the background I found that even MAS-Player struggled a bit, which all boils down to lack of chip memory.

If I'm wrong tell me, but owing to all functions needing CPU time, this is used from the ChipRAM, with only 2Megs on unexpanded A1200's this will suffer unless a graphics card is fitted to your miggy, however, I personally recommend Eyetech's MAS-Player, and give it 9-10, with it running I can now at long last hear all my favourite MP3's if full glorious stereo with now loss of quality whatsoever, in fact, the playing quality is 100% perfect, but I also think that to get the very best out of MAS- Player, and other devices like it plus having the opportunity to run your WB/Dopus in hi-spec screen resolutions with little or no strain on CPU time, a graphics card is a real necessity.

Of course with a graphics card you'll need a decent SVGA monitor with scandoubler/flicker fixer in order to get the best screen resolutions, so, my next investment is a Mediator PCI card and a 3dfx Voodoo3 3000 with 16Mb onboard....