Good evening folks,
If you are an Amiga owner that enjoys listening to MP3’s, please read on, as I’ve got some fantastic news for you today. 🙂
Yesterday, AmigaKit announced the immediate availability of the MAS Player Evolution. This is basically an MP3 decoder for old-school Amiga systems. With this device you can play MP3 files on your machine without burdening the CPU. This means ultra-smooth playback of MP3’s on an Amiga 1200 with Fast-RAM for example. The minimum requirement is just a 68020 CPU, but after what I’ve read on AmiBay, MAS Player should work on 68000 CPU’s as well. Will be interesting to see if someone gets it to run on Amiga 500. 🙂
Here are the full details from AmigaKit about this new piece of hardware:
MAS Player Evolution is a MP3 decoder for Classic Amiga computers.
MP3 decoder enables your Amiga to play MP3 music files on your hard disk without using your Amiga’s CPU to decode the MP3 files. This is very useful for Classic Amigas that do not have the power to play MP3 music.
Occupies the joystick and parallel ports – joystick port pass-through is provided so you can still use the joystick when MAS Player Evolution is connected to the Amiga.
Audio output is mixed in hardware between the Amiga and MP3 sound via a standard 3.5mm sound jack. MAS Player evolution features stereo RCA jacks to connect to the Amiga’s audio ports and route the Amiga sound through the MAS Player.
This hardware is compatible with the existing original MAS Player software. System requirements match the MAS Player software.
68020 or better CPU with at least 2MB of Fast Memory recommended.
If you’d like to check out the MAS Player Evolution, please head over to AmigaKit by clicking here.
I’d love to purchase this device for my Amiga 1200, but I must do some thinking first, as it costs quite a bit of cash. Would be cool to play all my favourite music on the Amiga though. Tempting!
Are any of you considering buying it? Maybe some of you have already ordered it? One thing is sure though, this kind of hardware is dangerous for the wallet, that’s for sure. 😉 So much cool Amiga stuff appearing these days and more is yet to come! 🙂
Old School Game Blog 
That is pretty cool. Wonder if more players will follow.
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Thanks for commenting. 🙂 Time will show what happens.
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It is awesome to see stuff still being produced for the old Amiga computers, if this keeps going then looks like Amiga may have a nice steady hold in the computer world as I still to this day prefer Amiga over any current computer to date, after all I still got a couple of A500’s myself and soon will add to my collection a nice A1200.
Zro Dfects
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Hi mate,
Thank you for your comment. 🙂 The Amiga 1200 is a big step up from the Amiga 500, so you’ve got a lot to look forward to. The internal IDE-controller of the machine makes it easy to fit a CF-card adapter with a memory card to use as a hardrive. Add a bit of extra RAM and you can run all your games from hard drive through WHDLoad. 🙂
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This is great news. Thanx for the post!!
Skateman1972
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Many thanks, Skateman! Glad you liked it! 🙂
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Just got my MAS Player for my Amiga 1200. Works as promised.
So, I have an “old” Amiga 1200, with a Compact Flash hard drive, NEW accelerator with 64MB RAM, and I routinely hook up a CF card (thru a PCMCIA adapter) or ethernet connection for file transfers.
And now, I’m playing MP3s from a CF card plugged into the PCMCIA port.
(While playing the Workbench minigame version of Arkanoid. 🙂
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Hi Desiv,
Many thanks for commenting. 🙂 Glad to hear that you’re enjoying the MAS Player! I’m seriously considering getting one myself. Was it easy to hook up and start using?
Is the accelerator the new one from Individual Computers?
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