Volos Projects Puts "Winamp" in Your Pocket, with a Cardputer Media Player Inspired by Nullsoft

Pseudonymous YouTuber "Volos Projects" is looking to bring Nullsoft's classic Winamp — or, at least, something that looks a lot like it — to a pocket-friendly format, writing a replica of the popular media player for M5Stack's Cardputer all-in-one M5StampS3 development board.

"Do you remember the time when we didn't use YouTube to listen to music," Volos asks, rhetorically, by way of introduction to the project. "A time when music was stored on our computers? Do you remember Winamp? Of course you do. Winamp was the first program I would install right after installing Windows. A program that witnessed many parties, drunken nights, and arguments of which song to play. Even today, I know people and bars that use it every day."

Inspired by this memory of a media player released by Nullsoft back in 1997, Volos has created his own "Winamp" — though it's not written for Microsoft Windows. Instead, Volos' version takes the visual style of Winamp 2 and puts it on M5Stack's Cardputer — a compact all-in-one development board built around the Espressif ESP32-S3 microcontroller launched by the company last year.

"One hardest part was to put this on this tiny display," Volos explains of the project's challenges. "This display is 240×135, so this is really, really tiny, and this speaker is not [the] loudest speaker — but in a quiet room this is enough to listen to music."

The firmware for the microcontroller was written in the Arduino IDE, and does not include any of the recently-released source code from the real Winamp — instead merely adopting its appearance, in a heavily-customized form suitable for the low-resolution display on the Cardputer.

The build is detailed in the video embedded above and on the Volos Projects YouTube channel, with the source code available on GitHub under an unspecified license.