I fondly remember a university project where we made an mp3 player - hardware based around an Intermetall (MAS) chip and the software to drive it. This was late 90's and the run of the mill 486 struggled to play 256kbps mp3's. I designed an interface around a PAL chip that received nibbles from the parallel port and serially sent them to the decoder chip. The program to parse the mp3 and bit-bang the parallel port I wrote in Turbo Pascal, and it actually did an amazing job, up to 320kbps mp3 could be played. Fun fact: the PAL originally couldn't quite keep up, so I had to increase the supply voltage (as well as the clock voltage level) and attach a heatsink to it!
