alt Hacker NewsUncompressed audio tracks may have been necessary to get acceptable performance. e.g. GTA 1 came with some PCM tracks on the CD. If you didn't like them, you could pop in a different CD and get different music on the radio in-game. Playing mp3's was, in the early to mid-90's, actually pretty intensive. There were still a decent number of 386's around that could barely run a mp3 player in a Linux console-only setup. You needed a 486 or better to even think about playing mp3's with a full graphical OS running, and probably a Pentium before you have enough CPU left over for the rest of a game.
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Back in the day, my 200mhz Pentium remained just-barely usable while listening to WinAmp, but there was noticeable latency.
For reference: I had a 486 DX2 66 MHz, and I played MP3s by decoding them in batch to PCM and then playing that as it couldn't really do that in real time. Perhaps only if you didn't do anything else and the MP3 was low bitrate enough and ideally mono.
CDROM and 386 would have been an odd combination though?
My 486 had a single speed CDROM but it only had a 500mb and a 100mb hard drive, so still wasn't playing mp3s
And don't forget to engage your "TURBO" button, to make the playback slightly better!
mp2's files were almost usable on 386 but they used tons of space.
Even as late as in 2008 I had such a slow machine that when I had to use NetBeans and I wanted to listen to music at the same time, I'd just play music CDs with headphones plugged into the headphones port of the cdrom drive :)