
                         Atari/C-Lab Falcon
           MPEG Audio Layer II PRG/ACC Realtime DSP Decoder
                            version 0.997
                            October 1999

                       http://mp2.nocrew.org/

                    a NoCrew Production MCMXCIX

       Copyright  Fredrik Noring & Tomas Berndtsson, 1998-1999

  This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
  it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
  (at your option) any later version.
  
  The file TOMSHELL.TOS is not included under the terms of GPL.


This is the version 0.995 release of the MPEG Audio Layer II decoder
by Fredrik Noring and Tomas Berndtsson.

See NEWS for more news after version 0.9.

New features from version 0.9 are:

       * Dynamic buffer allocation
       * Config file
       * Find next song in the same directory
       * Skip to next and previous song
       * Fast forward
       * Songs with CRC now work
       * Keyboard control
       * Change if count down or up

Some bugs has also been fixed:

       * Pause now works all the time
       * On play, the player was sometimes silent

Features from version 0.7 are still worth mentioning:

       * Handshaked DMA transfers
       * GEM interface, also working as ACC
       * Several new options, including pause and stop
       * Sync detection and recovery routines
       * Clock detection
       * Count-down display
       * MiNT support, and several other systems

Although this program has been tested successfully with various MPEG songs,
no warranties comes with the program. We are not responsible for anything
it might do to you or your system. If it works well for you, we'll gladly
take the credit for it.

The program is a standalone program and it is also designed to work as
an accessory. Simply rename the PRG to ACC and put it where the rest of
your accessories are.

The config file (MP2AUDIO.SHO) should be placed either in the same
directory as the program.
If no config file can be found or if an argument is invalid, the
default value(s) are used. The default values can be found in the
example config file.
Note that the config file is only loaded when the program is first
started. Therefore, if you run it as ACC, any changes in the config
file will only take place after a reboot or resolution change.

Here is a list of the keyboard controls:

  SPACE     -     Play/Stop
 Ctrl-l     -     (Load and) Play
 Ctrl-s     -     Stop
 Ctrl-o     -     Load (and don't play)
 Ctrl-p     -     Pause
 Ctrl-f     -     Next song
 Ctrl-b     -     Previous song
 Ctrl-v     -     Fast Forward
 Ctrl-r     -     Repeat on/off
 Ctrl-t     -     Count down/up
 Ctrl-i     -     Info
 Ctrl-u     -     Close top window

The player has been tested with both MultiTOS and oAESis running under
MiNT version 1.12, with and without NVDI 4.11, and of course normal TOS. 

The player supports the Drag & Drop protocol used in MultiTOS and other
desktops. This means you can drag a file from the desktop to the players
control window. If the Alternate key is held down when dropping, the 
player will only load the song, not start playing it. See the file BUGS!

In case the Drag & Drop protocol isn't supported, the player also works
with the VA_START message, used by at least Gemini and Thing. I have only
tested it with Thing, since I don't have Gemini. With VA_START, the song
always starts playing, but if you use Thing, it will use Drag & Drop as
first choice.

Currently, the resource file is only made for interlaced mode on RGB's 
and non-doublelined mode on VGA's. The program still works in other 
resolutions though.

There is no special mailing list for this product, but the most appropriate
mailing list for asking questions or giving great ideas is
nocrew-devel-misc@nocrew.org.
You can also contact the authors of the program, see addresses below.


We are interested in what kinds of MPEG files that work, so if you are
able to play songs with bitrates lower than 128 kbit/s, or frequencies
others than 44.1 kHz, please let us know. Also, if you run it in other
systems than the normal and the ones listed above, such as N.AES, XaAES,
MagiC, whatever, let us know.

MPEG audio files can be found at http://www.iuma.com.

Thanks to Anders Eriksson <ae@atari.org> for testing the program and his 
work on the resource file, even if we changed most of the original
resource. 
Thanks also to Konrad Kokoszkiewicz <draco@atari.org.pl> for support
of long filenames and more testing.
Another big thanks to Denis Huguet who provided the new clock detection
routine. 
Yet one to Michael Henke, author of DelfMPEG, an MPEG audio player
for the Amiga, for pointing out the mono bug.


Enjoy,

Fredrik Noring            Tomas Berndtsson
noring@nocrew.org         tomas@nocrew.org
http://www.noring.org/    http://tomas.nocrew.org/

Donations are welcome! Send money to:

   NoCrew DSP Productions        NoCrew Piglet Center
    Trskaregatan 69.10    or       Topasgatan 77
    S-583 33  Linkping         S-421 48  V. Frlunda
          SWEDEN                       SWEDEN

