Here I'll discuss the details of how this silly project's actually gonna work.
Since I'm not a terrifically wealthy student, I decided to go with a socet-7
based system. For decoding mp3's, I determined that the minimum processor
I could use was a standard pentium 100. Since I'm a big fan of overkill,
I actualy settled on a cyrix MX2-300 instead. Sryix chips may suck, but
this one has more than enough power for my apication, and only cost $43 (see
my list of costs). I'm using a heatsink/fan combo
that I had laying around, as that CPU gets _way_ hot without a heatsink. Duh.
Since I was unsucesful in finding a used socket 7 board (at a reasonable
price), I went out and bought a FIC VA-503+. It's a super-7 board with 1 MB
L2 cache and it doesn't use any intel chipsets - which is a benefit in my
eyes. It's also the best price / performance choice available for the
socket-7 platform at $73.
Currently I'm using a 2.1GB seagate EIDE hard drive that came in an old Dell I
had (XPS-P133c, was top-o-the-line when I bought it 4 years ago). It makes
the occasional scraping noise, and I think it's failing in places. So, I
replaced it with a new drive, and now I have hte seagate for testing. I feel
that I should use it at first to be sure I've decided on an adequate method
for mounting it ina manner that will isolate
it from most shocks. I figures, if it dies, I won't be out much since it
was going bad anyway... Regardless of why, I should be able to fit a pretty
good pile of music on the 1.9 GB of free space (I gave linux about 200MB).
By the time I have the money to put in a bigger drive (10+ GB?) I should have
most of the kinks worked out...
There's the misc other hardware as well, I suppose. I'm using an AT power
supply. It turned out to be cheaper to buy an AT case with supply than an
individual supply, so I did. I guess I'll sell the case in a while. I did
modify the PS a little, in that I removed power connectors that I won't use,
and I bypassed and removed the switch. I also disabled the aux. power
connector on the back (where a monitor usually hooks up) because I don't like
having open connections just laying around. :) I'm using a whistler 300Watt
power inverter. I went 300W because I wanna power a monitor too if the
need arises, and because it was only $68. I'm using a Realtek 10/100
PCI ethernet card (RTL 8139 chipset) because it's $20 and has great linux
support. There's a creative labs ensonique-based PCI sound card, so I can
run the radio and tape deck through the computer, and so I can avoid ISA.
It only cost $28. I've also got a generic 1MB cirrus-logic based video card
in there, so I can drive a monitor in the event something goes wrong, and
because that's what I had laying around.
I guess I should have mentioned the vacuum-fluorescent display in hardware, but it fits in "interface" reasonable well.
Linux.
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