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- 19/09/2001

Had nice Compaq Presario 460. Small pretty Mac-like all in one box 486 computer. Found left at Titchfield recycling centre (AKA, the rubbish dump) around May 2001, I was experimenting with using this sitting in the corner of my room to play MP3s, despite hotrodding this computer with 16Mb ram, 1Gb hard disk, Sound card and more importantly changing the AMD486SX2-66 chip for an Intel 486DX2-66 it doesnt cut it. Lovely little machine but even with using Mpxplay under DOS not enough raw speed makes MP3s plays terrible!! I'm pleased I saved it from certain death, I've now sold the '460 and shes gone to a new home teaching an old lady word processing. :o)

Now have a spare 1Gb hard disk and sound card for the project, and trying to source some cheap LCD screens.

- 25/09/2001

Got two Dell Optiplex base units off ebay cheap, one is going to a friend who is going to be doing the same project. They are ideal as the are slim neat units and the all plastic casing should painting them easier.

- 05/10/01

The Dells arrived in great condition apart from damage to the floppy drive mounting bracket, this doesnt matter as I took the floppy drive out. I was suprised to find my P90 machine actually has a 100Mhz chip in it and it has an onboard and network sound card, a Sound Blaster Vibra 16, and it works absolutely great. Dave's P133 runs great, but hes got to get some ram for it as his isnt suitable. Gave the case a clean and pulled off some off the stickers off the case. behind the front of case there is some metal chassis meant for holding an extra case fan, this will be in the way of the LCD screen so this will have to be chopped out. :o)

Fitted the spare 1Gb Seagate hard disk, and two 8Mb sticks, I couldnt find my DOS disks, so I put a dead basic install of Win95 and it runs great. After it was installed I remove the floppy drive and put the CD drive in the bottom and covered the top bay, I also removed the ribbon cable and disabled the floppy drive in the bios and now the machine boots faster. :o) With MPXPLAY in my start up folder, the machine boots from cold in 25 seconds which is not bad, it will be better when I get in DOS on there.

Bit of a pain, these Dells require drive rails for the CD drives, and I dont have any, and they look as though they are specific to this machine, :o/

Also disregard what I said about all plastic case. I had a similar 486 model Optiplex with an all plastic case but this one has plastic bottom case shell and front panel, but the top of the Optiplex XL590 is standard steel.

- 10/10/01

My Hitachi 4x CD drive was bust, so I ditched it and got an used unknown brand 8x drive locally.

Need to get DOS on there instead, as Win95 is not ideal, I want to turn it off when I like and not worry about shutting down properly and messing about with scandisk.

CD drive takes a while to read FAT (file allocation table, the first sector of the CD with its contents list on) so when changing from track it often jumps, I'd like to see if any caching software is available that will cure this problem.

Was going to order the LCD screens today from EIO from the US, found out my Paypal account wont work as it has my out of date credit card on file, darn. :o(

- 12/10/01

I got an unbranded 40x CD drive for £5, it tends to get lost find tracks on the CD, now I know why it was cheap :o) Cleaned the laser which didnt make any difference.

- 20/11/01

LCDs arrived today, (came shipped from the US) hurray!!

Have no job, being made redundant sucks, :o( but have bit more time time for this project.

Tried wiring up and got confused by the diagrams, when soldering onto the potentiometers (screen brightness and contrast controls) I cant figure out which pin is which. :o/

Looking at this interesting site, this guy wired up his screen without the potentiometers, and just used one resistor, So I got some resistors (7p each :o) powered it up and nothing. I am fairly sure my wiring is wrong so got to recheck this.

- 21/11/01

Decided to have a go and respraying the metal case. Various websites on case modding say you should sand the case and use primer before respraying. I didnt, I just started using silver car paint on the case, it covers ok, but its not very consistant and patchy. Using the can at 90 degrees doesnt work properly, I discovered after spraying madly for 10 minutes. :o) After a few more coats of paint, its not bad but far from perfect.

- 22/11/01

My friend Steve cut the hole in the front and the holes for the mounting screws. Ok screen doesnt work yet but it fits perfectly and looks superb!!

Wanted to do some more coats, but the weather is bad and I have to paint it in the garden as I dont have a garage.

Playing around with a nice Apricot 486DX4-100 base unit I saved from the garbage, Mpxplay will work, but when using it under Windows 95, it really struggles if you so much move the mouse whilst playing tunes, Im giving this computer to a friend.

- 25/11/01

Found a Samsung 2Gb hard disk amongst a heap of old (and not so old) parts left in a box for the bin men near a friends house, it was a little wet so I dried it off and it works!! Put it in the Dell and its running very nicely.

I am now using a Sony 2x which is nice because its quiet and there is very litttle difference in speed between in this and modern CD drive.

- 30/11/01

Did another coat, manage to put some drips on the sides which doesnt look to good, need to sand the sides and redo them sometime.

Tried the blue LED mod, took only a few minutes and looks very cool indeed :o)

- 1/12/01

Wired up my second LCD, and had the backlight working for a while, and managed to break of the wires twice, whilst fiddling with the software to get something to appear on it, I noticed there smoke coming out of it. It would appear I am using the wrong resistor which is got so hot its melted the wire soldered onto it.

- 5/12/01

Bought some black spray paint from a model shop

Removed the face plate of the case and took the screen out and prised out the case badge out. Sat it on some newspaper and did it black, after two coats its looking good.

- 6/12/01

Tried to paint the bottom case shell black, as the bottom sides of the case are still white, but managed to run out of paint. Went out and got so more. Painted the shell upside down, this was a bad idea as I sprayed too much out and it started to run, I am not too bothered though, will do the side bottom panels properly upright (ie: with the case shell on its side, so it doesnt run this time. :o)

Painted the case badge orange, thought it would give it an interesting look.

- 15/12/01

Bought a scruffy beat up yellowed old Gateway PS/2 keyboard for a couple of pounds.

Cracked up the case and yay! theres a nice encoder board ideal for making the switch panel.

This small circuit board is about 3" x2" with plus the keyboard I have strapped inside the case using cable ties. Prodding two of the pins on encoder PCB with two wires produces a key, so with a bit of experimenting you can just use the keys you want wired to a switch. Just got the find some nice switches now.

Took out the 3 green keyboard LEDs as we dont need them and I junked the keys and case.

- 16/12/01

Modified the IDE cable into a narrow gauge type (see main page for link) this make the cable arrangement tidier and makes airflow better. :o)

- 19/12/01

Given up using the orange Humbrol model paint on some bits of the case trim. Have tried twice to paint the case badge (above the screen) and the paint just goes a nasty rubbery texture and doesnt harden properly. Spent a while scraping the nasty stuff off, and going to get more spray paint.

- 22/12/01

Done the badge silver like the rest of the case. Also a final coat to the metal case, looking perfect now.

Realised the screen is sort of actually working. If I plug it the machine without using the 5 volts for the backlight, you can see a very faint image, although I can only see the left 8 characters.

Tried to use the previously mentioned tempermental 40X CD drive and it went bang. Oops, in the bin it went.

- 05/01/02

Went to a local computer store that was closing down, and bought a 32x CD drive and got couple of Pentium chips and some Dell drive rails free :o) Got home and the CD drive appears to be bust. :o(

- end of Februaryish 02

Now have a decent Sony 24x drive which runs great, and Ive painted the front black.

- 10/06/02

Im still here!! Not done that much work, as just been using the box to listen to tunes and chilling out

Have bargain priced 10Gb hard disk for £26 off eBay arriving soon, gonna have to reisntall everything with Windows 95 ver B otherwise I will be stuck with the 2Gb limit that Ver A Im using has.

Also getting Infared cable off ebay for £10 which attaches to serial port to use any TV or stereo remote control :o)

- 22/06/02

Have the Western Digital 10Gb hard disk running very nicely, the drive is fast and quiet, its great!! I had to use a util called EZ-Drive to hack the BIOS, as the machine would take up to an 8Gb drive.

As mentioned earlier, Ive reinstalled the Windows 95 but using version B so I can use all the drive without lots of partitions, what I didnt realise is there Ver B actually has some differences I didnt know about, I installed everything same as before, ie: no fancy bits and removed the start up and shut down picture files, but I no longer require DOS drivers for my sound card, so my boot time is now down to about 15 seconds :o)

Not managed to get the Infared cable to work yet :o(

- 28/06/02

Ive renamed the box to Smokey, why? Because the spray paint I used for the front panel was called Smoke Black :o)

Yay! We are listed on www.mp3projects.com!

on a different note, Ive spotted some software that plays DivX movies in DOS :o) Was wondering if someones built a dedicated box for Divx? I wouldnt start on a project to do this myself just yet, as I am not familiar with how DivX works and whats the most basic computer (low end Pentium II?) you could use to run it reliably is, sounds interesting though.

29/06/02

Remote control now works, yeah!!

10/7/02

Hole cut in the front for the reciever, and filed the gap to fit.

Got given a nice slot DVD drive by my cousin which apparently reads CDs ok, but not DVDs, went online to see if I could get a firmware update for it.

11/7/02

Managed to borrow a glue gun to attach the infared reciever

14/7/02

Pentium 150 chip I bought off ebay for £1 arrived today, fitted and works fine

15/7/02

Did some work on this site, and put a few new pictures in.

NEARLY FINISHED!!

Febuary & March 2003 NEW!!

well again, long time since anything has been changed,

Got a new digital camera which has proper flash but not to great on close up work as the flash can be a little too bright and not got much in the way of graphics editing software at the moment.

I tried rewiring up those LCDs again and still got no where.

Wandering around ebay got me a prewired one including shipping from Germany for 40 Euros, it arrived about about a week later, all professionally wired up

Moments later I had it attached to the machine and playing around with MPXPLAY's INI script file, as it initially made the music glitchy, after changing the screens refresh settings, its running lovely now!!

Im still using a cheap horrible keyboard and crummy old 640x480 VGA monitor to run the system at the moment, a little bit of refining is needed to the remote controls settings to run the unit completely stand alone.

So thats it, few drawbacks to be sorted out soon:

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