mp3 operating system ?

That''s an interesting idea. I''m trying to think of exactly what it would need. A FAT/NTFS/EXT2/whatever filesystem driver. An MP3 decoding engine. A rudimentary driver layer or hard-coded support for specific sound cards. I suppose it wouldn''t need PMT for anything. Would you want it to be interactive; e.g. be able to stop or fast-forward the MP3?

interactive is desireable of course but just getting it to play one to start with would be nice. As far as interaction goes, increasing and decreasing volume, advancing to the next song, being able to insert a cd with mp3''s on it. I was thinking more along the lines instead of a hard drive, for it to load the mp3s off of a cd and play them.
But I dont need this to be interactive like being able to visually see stuff because I wont have a screen with this. To be able to control it I will put together some kind of crude control device, something somewhat similar to a gamepad or something with each button representing a different action plugged up through a seriel or parallel port.....i dont think those are too hard to program into an OS.

"I pity the fool, thug, or soul who tries to take over the world, then goes home crying to his momma."
- Mr. T

Indeed, serial and/or parallel port communication is a relatively easy aspect of OS development. Only supporting CD drives would also make life easier, as you could focus on ISO9660 instead of any particular platform-specific filesystem. As for interactivity, I suppose you could either code the input routines directly into the MP3 decoder''s main loop, or have a simple cooperative multitasking system, giving much higher priority to the MP3 decoder. This sounds like it would be fun to code ... alas, if I only had the spare time ...

There are a couple of projects that focused on building "embedded" (using the term loosely) MP3 players, such as for cars. Most of them were based on the Linux kernel though...

I''ve seen an in-car PC that ran MS-DOS 6.22 and used a DOS MP3 player. The user interface was via RS232 serial to a keypad and 40 character by 2 line LCD display on the dashboard. This is as simple as you are likely to get.

Steve ''Sly'' Williams  Monkey Wrangler  Krome Studios