Not that I want to blow my own trumpet too much – but I was very
pleased to see that the game I just finished working on, the Xbox
version of Delta Force: Black Hawk Down, has moved up to number 2 in
the Xbox Live chart. Wahey!

I’m not sure what exactly the chart tracks, but I think its number of
people playing the game online. To be honest, I very much doubt that
Halo 2 will ever be knocked off the no 1 spot – the multiplayer part of
the game is extremely slick and enjoyable, and they have an impressively detailled
web site for the obsessive stat tracker. So to get to number 2 behind
Halo is as much success as I could hope for, and is a credit to all the
hard work and late nights that my colleagues (and I) put in, for many
months, finishing the game off.

I wonder how long it’s going to stay there? This is only the second
week of being in the chart, after entering at no. 3 — I hear that
sales are still going strong and that they’ve had to order more from
the factory, so fingers crossed!

ok, now to make it actually do stuff!

Firstly the baics:
Windows
XP
Windows
firewall & anti-spyware
NOD32 anti-virus
Oh,
and I couldn’t resist installing Firefox as
well

As I mentioned before, I did previously try using linux to run a media
box, but I really just don’t have the time for the necessary tinkering
to get it to work. For once, some credit has to go to Microsoft -
windows is a standard, for better or worse, and that’s actually quite
helpful – all sorts of eosteric bits of hardware have a tendancy to
‘just work’ due to their having Windows drivers already. Which is
actually rather handy from time to time. (I still prefer Mac OS X for
my home machines, however)

Now,
to actually run the media playback side of things, I looked into
various software packages – some free (freevo) and some not
(meedio) but
I settled on Beyond
Media for it’s “just work”-ing ness. It also works
very well with my touch screen, and with the addition of a handy
plugin, it works with the Remote Control I have
too.

If you’re interested here’s the page for the remote control drivers
and
here’s the page for the touchscreen drivers… Just in case you’re
building something like this yourself.

So shockingly, it all
works!
Yay! I can play back DVDs, music and videos, and Beyond Media even has
some very
handy plugins to download Weather information, Movie
Trailers
and cinema showtimes, and I could even write my own (although lack of
free time rather suggests that I won’t).

Here’s the result so far:

(and yes, I do have Beaver and Steve comics posted up)

So now we ‘just’ need to cram all of that into the old Mac
case….

Next time, I’ll bring you up to date on where I am now, and in the
meantime hopefully make some more progress on the mod!

ok, despite being a small-ish PC there was just too much to cover in
the last post. So here’s the second part of� ‘the
guts’!

The most important remaining part is the screen!

I
decided on an 8 inch touchscreen LCD Monitor – the Lilliput
809GL-80NP-T.
This should replace the 9 inch black & white tube in the mac
originally. Now, ideally I’d have liked a 9 inch screen but they don’t
seem to do those – also LCD screens are actually flat and square, and
the old mac screen is very curvy – so they’re never going to match up
properly at the edges without some fiddling.

Why a touch-screen? Again, I didn’t want the mac to need a
mouse and
keyboard attached to use it, but to be sat on its own as an
interesting
little thing to look at, but also be practical. A touchscreen means
that you can operate it using just fingers, or a little pointer, pen
lid, whatever. It’s pretty easy to clean off the smudgey finger prints
- and the little screen isn’t really what you’d watch a video on
anyway
- that’s why I have another TV / monitor output on the second graphics
card. That will hook up to a bigger display.

The touchscreen itself is just a USB cable and a rather
excellent driver that has a lot
of calibration options, more in fact that the tablet PC I
used to own! Go figure…

As the little screen was originally designed to fit into car
seats,
it is very low power and heat, so it’s perfect for my requirements -
it
also only needs DC 12V to power it, and not too many watts either.So
in
theory I should be able to run it off the main power supply for the
rest of the PC.

After looking up a couple of things on the internet, a trip to
maplin and a bit of trial and error, I created this cable:

It converts from a ‘morex’ power connector (found inside a PC)
to
the ‘jack plug’ connector the monitor used. Amazingly, it even works!
I
only need one power supply and on/off switch for the whole thing,
excellent.

One slight snag though – the monitor starts up in a ‘standby’
mode.
I checked with the manufacturers and their official way to fix that is
to take the thing apart, desolder a resistor and solder on extra wires
and a capacitor (so that when the power comes on, it also presses the
ON switch for you).� To be honest, that scared even me a bit
too
much at the moment, so I’ll be leaving that for now…

I also wanted to be able to control the mac from the comfort
of my
sofa – happily I’d previously bough an ATi Remote Wonder, which is a
radio-based remote that has a little USB receiver. Because it’s not
infra-red, again I don’t need to maim the front of the mac to put an
infra red receiver in. Hooray! Also, the range is much
better

Now as I’ve previously said, cables are bad – grr! So the mod
really
wouldn’t be complete without some form of WiFi adapter to use the
wireless network at home. Happily the Netgear router I’d bought a
while
back came with a free USB
WiFi Adapter, so that goes in the case too!

A few final bits and bobs to connect things together: I needed
a
nice rounded
IDE cable to go between the hard drive and the motherboard
- making it easier to put the drive where I wanted and improving
airflow and cooling in the case. Also the DVD drive needed a little
2.5″ drive
adapter screwed on the back, so that I could plug a standard
IDE cable into it (laptop and desktop drives have different
connectors,
though there’s no especially good reason for it)

A quick thought for the future – if you wanted to build your
own ‘Media Centre’ you might want to include a USB2
Digital Freeview TV Receiver for recording/receiving TV? I’ll
probably leave it out of the mac (for now!)

So that’s everything that I’m going to stick inside the Mac -
next time we’ll look at the software that actually makes it do (hopefully useful)
stuff…

So what’s going inside this crazy mac mod?

The
brains of the beast is a Mini-itx 1Ghz
motherboard
- with built-in graphics, audio and usb/firewire. Almost a whole PC in
a tiny package! There is now a much larger range of these with
multiple
network ports, built in DC invertors, flash/PCMCIA card readers…
They
were originally designed for ‘embedded’ systems such as point-of-sale
tills, information stands, industrial control, and so on. But the
geeks
(such as me) quickly discovered that they were great for sticking into
all kinds of bizarre shells, or cars, or old consoles. Mini-itx.com
has
a great list of
projects on their site – very inspiring!

Although my ‘stock’ motherboard was very small and cute, it
still
wasn’t quite good enough for me yet… the CPU had a tiny fan sat atop
its little heatsink, and unfortuantely this fan emitted a rather
irritating high pitched whine… a slightly larger replacement fan
solved this problem for me.

Also, the first case I put the board into had quite a loud
power
supply – completely ruining the “silent PC” I was tying to create at
the time, noo! Fortunately better minds than I had already created the
PW-70A
snap-in DC-DC invertor.

You
may well be asking “what the hell is that?” Basically it replaces the
noisy power supply that converts mains AC 240V electricity into DC 12V
with a little board that converts DC 12V to the various different
voltages the board requires. To get power to that, we use a
laptop-style ‘brick’ power adapter. As usual there’s a range of them
available online.

So, now that I have a mostly-silent motherboard, what
else?Well, to
make a mini-itx into a full PC you simply need to add some storage
and memory to it. I put a single 512Mb memory bank into the single
slot
available on the motherboard (an unfortunate downside to the smallness
of the board is the consequent lack of upgrade space on it).

A 120Gb 3.5″ hard drive to provides some space for storing
all the lovely media!

To play back DVDs and possibly record/back up data, I have a
slot
loading ‘laptop’ dvd/cdrw drive. It’s a Panasonic CW8123. Why a little
slot-loading drive? Most importantly, I don’t want to mangle the front
of the lovely Mac that all this gubbins is going into – so
slot-loading
is vital. I’m going to copy a trick from a previous Mac mod and simply
widen the floppy dirve slot so that you can pass CDs through it, and
mount the drive the other side. Very neat! A secondary consideration
is
that laptop drives use much less power – the DC invertor I’m using has
a maximum of 100W, and every Watt counts!

Now, the Mini-itx has a perfectly good built-in video card,
it even
has a TV output. But I wanted to be able to run an external display,
as
well as the little touchscreen that would be built into the Mac, so
I� added a Radeon
9200SE
graphics card. They’re pretty cheap
and cheerful, and importantly they don’t have giant fans or heatsinks
on them – cooling is an issue with small PCs and I didn’t want things
to overheat inside the case. This gives me a couple of monitor outputs
and s-video on the same card – so technically I could drive four displays
from this now, but that would just be silly. Ok, more silly than it
already is. (A small technical aside; as the Mini-itx
motherboards only have a PCI expansion slot, I had to get� the
PCI
version of the card. Something to be aware of if building your
own…)

You know what? This post is getting quite long now, so I’ll
have to leave it for now… more tomorrow or possibly later
today.

For now, a sneak peak at the assembled gubbins:

Whoo! Try to contain your excitement as the article continues…
later….

Yes, Apple now has a two button mouse for sale!

Sadly, they don’t have the Bluetooth version yet Due to my inherent
hatred of cables on the desktop, I’ll have to wait until that comes
out, then I can retire my wireless Microsoft mouse – which never sat
well with the mac really. Perhaps I’ll use the old wireless mouse in my
crazy mac mod instead?

Drat!

P.S. bonus points to anyone who remembers the last time “Hell Froze Over” in the Mac world. Anyone?

It’s on tonight at 11pm on BBC 3 but if you only have “Poor man’s telly” as my workmates put it, you can see it online right now

Well done to the beeb for putting brand new comedy onto the interweb!