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...unless it's the same guy:

http://mini-itx.com/projects/nespc/

Orange

Is the small board used, and that this really isn't all that remarkable.

Go to Mini-ITX.com and go see some other cool mini-board mods.

I'm working on mine!
Later
Josh

tutorial about transforming that old Nintendo into a PC

Really, this is just a very-much-not-unique-or-novel story on taking a mini-ITX board and stuffing it into some random thing.

Next we'll see:
Jim sends us a tutorial about transforming that old empty Whitman's Sampler box into a PC
Pam sends us a tutorial about transforming that old kitty litter box into a PC
Ned sends us a tutorial about transforming that old lunch box into a PC

Oh yeah...I remember where I've already read all this stuff...

Nice ditch effort to bolster the story, Taco: Does anyone else think that Super Mario 3 might have been the best game ever?

Technique #4- if a story topic is lame, just add a few (unrelated) topics to the story in a shotgun approach to digging up interest.

... has been published for some time at http://mini-itx.com.

Course very few people make good sidescroller/jumpers in the era of the 3D console.

Did anyone else play Duke Nukem: Manhattan Project? Full-on 3D, but gameplay was a good, old-fashioned side-scroller.... Duke even jumped the same way as the original Duke Nukem!

The tutorial has more info, but as it has been slashdoted, you can read about another NES casemod here.

At Mini-ITX.com.
There was a even a company selling converted NES-to-PCs or kits or something. Ah! Here's the link.
They also do Atari 2600s and Amiga 1000s (I would never defile my A1000!).

Most of these small PCs I've looked at have been >$300 (the one linked in the story doesn't list a price), and haven't been fast enough for my needs, so I looked and found a better solution: Mini-ITX.

These motherboards are only 100 dollars and a little more than 6 inches square. They have integrated video, 800MHz VIA C3 processors, ethernet, TV out, sound, and 2 IDE busses. And the fact that they use C3 processors, they only consume 10 watts, for the whole motherboard! You can get more info here:

http://mini-itx.com/
http://shop2.outpost.com/product/3349552
http://www.via.com.tw/en/VInternet/mini_itx.jsp

Orange

If you want a low-cost system for playing music and videos, get yourself a Mini-ITX system; they start at around $200. For gaming, pay a little bit more and get yourself a real PC with a high-end graphics card.

Hmm... I still think we should be hiding the home computing (a la 'Trek), not turn them into clocks =).

Still it's on the right way. Call me when the whole thing is turned into a picture frame

Tivos were selling for £150, last time I looked. I think you'd be hard pressed to put something together from scratch that came in for less than £200...

If you were going stay small, you'd need a mini-itx or similar, and one of them plus case plus a video capture card would already put you up to your £150 limit, and that's before you add in memory and a hard drive, not to mention a remote control.

Even after that, you need the software for it, and none of the free projects doing this kind of thing have reached anywhere near Tivo functionality yet.

The only way you'd make it cheaper than a Tivo is if you were using bits of old computers you've got lying around, which sure as hell isn't going to make it small or quiet.

Now, cue the various comments complaining about this 'home of the future' just because Microsoft did it. It would be interesting to see what sort of thing Apple, Sun or Novell could come up in comparison ..

More information on the Microsoft home is available here and here.

Oh, and .. first post?

Blah, blah... pcs are ugly next to the tv...

How about this?

Mobos about $100 US, grab a spare hd and dvd drive, fork over $40-$50 for the case and call it a day.

Totally a PC. Upgrade it with a gf4 and play to your heart's content.

Just because the marketing giants try to cram something down your throat doesn't mean there aren't completely open and viable alternatives.

your site does 4.3 million a day on a K611-500?

It did, when slashdotted. It's since been updated to a VIA C3 at 800 MHz.

You're full of CRAP.

No, it's a high-content site without all those frilly graphics and doesn't use dynamic methods to serve up static data. Just dumb-obvious things.

The Win TV 250 PVR has an encoder that some users are having success with the encoding, but it is still very young. Serious discussion is going on on this discussion group. However, the pci card forces users to choose a larger form factor box that can accommodate a pci card instead of the cool small boxes. The MPEG decoder portion has been gloriously included in the new via epia board using the new chipset. I haven't tested how well it works (or if it is supported in linux yet).

In essence, using off the shelf components takes a lot of hardware that would normally be on the motherboard of a true home theater component. Thus, to achieve this we are getting closer but not quite there yet.

All the other operations (mp3/games/networking) etc are already available and very usable on a 933 mhz Via C3.

I think there is a lot of scope for cases to get more interesing. Case modding was never going to get into the mainstream cause it was a little (well a lot) too geekey.
But with power becoming less relivant for the average user, price and looks are going to start becoming selling points
I know mac clued up to this ages ago but PC makers arn't there yet.
Mini ITX has a lot of potential, even if it is a bit under powered at the moment.My fave case for this is the netbox cubit. It looks very nice but it is a little pricy for my liking.
There are a few more cases over at mini itx
I have been carting round my tower for too long so now I want to go to the other extreme.

• VIA EPIA 800 - $110.71
  
• 256MB PC133 - $46.53
  
• Cubid 2688R Mini-ITX Case - $94.67
  
• Toshiba Slimline 8X DVD - $136.38

• Maxtor 80GB 7200RPM HD - $133.17
  
• Geforce 4 PowerPack Pro/450 w/TV-out 64MB - $120.34

Take a look at the "Mediabox".

I also remember a German company coming out with a fanless case of the same form factor. It was fanless because it used heat-pipes to cool the CPU that exported heat to huge heat-sinks on the sides. Does anyone know where to find this?

VIA Eden my friend.

Built in TV-OUT (RCA & S-Video), Ethernet, and Line-out (converters to RCA available for ~ $5), as well as SPDIF if you don't need the RCA TV-OUT.

All available for ~ $100 w/proc. It's quiet. It's cheap. It's functional.

Throw in a couple old, otherwise useless, sticks of SDRAM... ditto on the P/S... build your own OS (it uses x86, so pick your favorite distro)... make it a seldom-write OS and put it on a compact flash card. Put a reader in it somewhere (you can get them inexpensively here)... presto chango, you have a completely solid-state computer that you paid < $200 for. It's got USB so if you want a WI-FI card, add it yourself. It even has internal headers for it so you don't have to have a dongle hanging outside your case.

FYI, I have one. I put a full hard drive in mine. Plus DVD player. Plus serial-port IR remote control receiver. Total cost was ~ $350, but a lot of the components have come down in price since then. I use Windows 98 SE with Media Player 9 and Real Networks One Player v.1 and it works great. The OS license was from an old computer that I've installed Linux on, so it was free. I even wrote a custom app to boot into in VB. It took about a day, and it lets me get to most of my common functionality easily, even when running in my car. It's also convenient (and snazzy) when I have friends over. Doesn't look like Windows, it looks like a high-end av component.

IIRC, Real Networks doesn't have a Linux driver and NFS doesn't have a Windows driver, so you may be SOL as far as compatibility on both of those counts... samba may be your answer. Or one of the unix compatibility toolkits for windows. Or if WINE is working well enough, that may be the way to go.

BTW, details and fun ideas about this form factor can be had at this link

If anyone is interested in my experiences or tips about this platform, feel free to e-mail me at the slashcode-guarded e-mail address listed above. I get lots of spam so if I don't answer within a couple days, try a resend.

Why not build a PC into your stereo? That's exactly the route I'm taking. A Mini-ITX motherboard for 100-200$ (Builtin everything), an old stereo to test it on from the Goodwill, a few other pieces and you have an all in one multi-media box.
In fact, Im setting it up with a wireless NIC and will be able to use my IPAQ to control BrowseAMP to change mp3s anywhere in the house.
Add to that an IR controller and the IR stuff for Winamp and it's an all-in-one solution for a lot less then one of these.

Now, granted, it's not going to handle everything you throw at it, it's only an 800 to 933Mhz Via CPU, but it's all I need.
They had a similar case like this on The Screensavers 2 days ago, and the case alone is 200$.
Thats the price for everything in my setup, including the stereo.
It's nothing special, as it's a test to see if ti works, but hell, I got the idea here at slashdot from another poster.

Nice hack but I think a mini-itx could be squeezed in there as well. This would make is a full up self contained system. Then go for the retro look and add a lcd to the top of the carriage....Priceless

(we hardly knew ya Cyrix)

Get reacquainted

this is a great technology that would probably be really usefull in laptop/notebook computers or even really small desktop (entire computer into the flatpanel display! but really, serial ports? parallel ports? i'm not too sure that the scsi is going to win them any points either, but what the hell. they might have well integrated a video controler, an audio controler, and a 9600 baud modem to boot!

Speaking from an embedded-device perspective, this is heaven in a tiny package. Forget video and audio, the sync serial ports and ethernet are all I need!

If you're looking at a small desktop (that seems to be the direction of your comments), I think the Via C3 processor on a mini-ITX board is the direction you ought to go. Works wonderfully with Linux.

I saw this over at mini-itx.com a couple days ago and thought to myself, nah, that's too stupid to submit to /. Obviously, I need to lower my standards a little bit.

Also linked from the Inquirer, these make use of the cheap and highly integrated mini-itx motherboards from Via Technologies. The case is a bit wacky but the motherboards are great for making little silent boxes for use as a firewall or low-end desktop machine.

From the photos, it looks like a Mini-ITX based system, and the story is linked from the home page of min-itx.com

Mini-ITX boards are produced by VIA, and generally have one of their low speed C3 CPUs. Many don't need active cooling. The motherboard also features the usual RAM, IDE, USB, and PCI slots, and will run most x86 operating systems. They are also substantially cheaper than conventional setups, because everything is integrated and they lack a CPU socket or expensive CPU.

There appear to be a great number of Mini-ITX based case moding projects out there, many linked from mini-itx.com. Enthusiasts have housed their systems in Toasters, bakerlite radios, Sun Boxen, Playstations, etc. The sphere was only a matter of time.

Allright, I was impressed by the whole sphere thing. I've been thinking about buying myself aocuple of those mini-itx mobos to play with, see where I can stick 'em. But then I started clicking around on links, and I found this. It leaves that ball mod in the dust. A full PC inside a shiny chrome GE toaster from the 60's. It's even got a cold cathode light, and an LCD screen! I particularly love how the CD tray pops up out of the toaster's slot. :D

From the troll who created the google goatse link, I present the mini itx goatse link!

Its sperical and brillant!

The spherical PC has been around for a while. More info can be had here and here.

There's a very short description of this at theinquirer.net found through mini-itx.com where this is old news.

The PCs, about the size of a soccer ball, are spherical and use Via's Mini-ITX design with an EPIA motherboard, a 40GB hard drive and an external 200 watt power supply.

The balls open in the middle and are expected to cost ¥5,000 when they ship.

and http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=6830

Similar to the way that an Athlon 1600+ is faster than an older 1600mhz Tbird, the VIA C3 processors are nowhere near as fast as equivalently clocked Pentiums or Athlons. I'm highly skeptical that a 900mhz C3 is close to the performance of a 900mhz Crusoe, which by most accounts performs as you would expect a near-1ghz processor to do.

But man, Transmeta has totally missed the boat by not making basic, affordable computers available to hobbyists. FlexATX and C3-driven Mini-ITX boards are enjoying the kind of hobbyist popularity that helped put AMD on the map a few years ago. This $1000 "developer board" is too little, too late, and too much freakin' $$$!

Additionally, if you're looking for higher end right now, choose one of the many mini-itx configurations available. http://www.mini-itx.com is a wonderful site based in the UK. Buy directly from them or use one of the vendors they recommend.

Sorry Linus , but people developing for tiny platforms can't afford to spend an extra $400-$500 for a Transmeta solution.

or you could just use via's mini-itx multimedia platform for around $100 (board, cpu, network, sound & video).

mini-itx.com

He was standing in the Gnu section, and it seemed these bull yaks were in rut and ready to mate with the first hairy thing with a hole in its center they found. Bad luck for RMS and his beard. Just then he felt cloven hooves push him down...

The point of building an XScale-based desktop PC and then sticking it into such a big, ugly package really eludes me. It's not like you can add a lot of expansion boards to it anyway.

The point of building an XScale-based desktop PC and then sticking it into such a big, ugly package really eludes me. It's not like you can add a lot of expansion boards to it anyway.

And, for better or for worse, despite the carping of usability engineers and the whining of Microsoft zealots, if they run Gnome/KDE, Mozilla, and OpenOffice on it, end users will have a software experience not too different from Windows with Microsoft Office.

I went with the VIA EPIA 800, which features an 800 MHz VIA C3 CPU with on-board TV-out (and much more) for a mere US$120. And it's tiny for a full-featured computer, just 170mm x 170mm.

Plus, it has built-in audio, on-board Ethernet (though I've plugged in a wireless PCI card), USB, etc. -- great for a project like this. And it runs GNU/Linux like a champ.

I put it in a US$90 black mini-ITX case so it doesn't look like a computer -- it looks like an A/V component, fitting right in with the VCR and the cable box.

Finally, it runs very cool and very quiet (or it will once I remove the noisy hard disk and make it boot off the network instead) -- just one small CPU fan required. The CPU isn't that powerful -- mostly around the speed of a 600MHz Celeron, and the FPU is a little weaker than that -- but it's plenty of power for me.

There's a lot more info about this and similar hardware at mini-itx.com. I think a big market is developing around these little boxes.

In fact, probably even the new EPIA-M board is a better deal for many applications; the EPIA-M costs $160 with processor, uses a 933MHz C3 (Pentium compatible), is tiny, and uses comparatively little power. And if you buy one of those, you don't even give money to the other monopoly.

And I predict that in 2012, this man will be president...of the world!

It seems like you could pretty easily ditch the laptop and set up a mini-ITX motherboard (like the VIA Epia) and an 802.11 card or USB adapter. Then you could run VNC on your desktop to see what the camera sees and to set up the software.

This won't be ready for prime time until someone builds a set top box DVD player that will plug into a router and do this automatically (with minimal configuration). The AOL of movies, if you will...

A good application for MiniITX and LinuxBIOS?

According to my calculations, all that means I am going to meet a tall, dark stranger tomorrow and then go on a long journey. I hope it is to somewhere nice!

By sheer coincidence, I just saw a picture of your stranger.

My hobbit hole might get a little warm with my 4 computers all stuffed into a small, poorly circulated room. but a hobbit hole sounds fun. -)

Sorta offtopic, but here's a cool case mod - a mini itx board in a hobbit-hole.

I watched a show once that demonstrated how the lines could have been made. They made a Neo-Nazca figure with just sticks and ropes. If you plant a stick in the ground and attach a rope to it, you can walk in a circle by keeping your distance.

There is a QuickTime of said video here

Someone else mentioned serial ports for connecting to LCDs like these. If you want a graphical LCD with a fast update rate parallel may be the way to go.

Note that I'm talking about small LCDs and VFDs which might be monochrome & only have a resolution of 240x64 or 240x128. While the case modders tend to use them for displaying temperatures, mp3 song titles and spectrum bargraphs, think about the embedded possibilities. Not only are these LCDs smaller, but they draw less power than VGA and better color TFTs.

You could boot from a CompactFlash card and have a really teeny hot tub controller that uses fingerd to report current temperature & power consumption, using the parallel port to talk to the sensor/control board.

Consider a box with a 200GB 3.5" hard drive and a "universal" 12V power supply that'll run from a car, a big battery or a lump-in-the-line (power consumption a bit high for a wall-wart). Not a 1.7" or 2.5" drive, but enough room to hold every CD you own maybe even in FLAC instead of OGG as well as every digiphoto you've ever taken.

With no CD-ROM or AGP slot, it would be considerably smaller than a Shuttle XPC or even a Cubid. The new VIA EPIA M will have USB 2.0, FireWire and 100Mb/s ethernet for getting stuff in & out of your "All Box."

For controlling playback on the go add a few buttons and a rotary encoder scanned by the parallel port and a serial LCD (or a PIC to handle user input & a parallel LCD).

You can build smaller systems for ip to real-world, but this thing runs Linux and BSD, a real 32 bit processor with an MMU and plenty of memory. None of that mucking about with 8-bit assembly or (horrors) BASIC Stamps. Write your nuclear-bomb-tipped earth-boring machine control code in Java if you like!

Hardware for the embedded market is usually more expensive for equivalent capability as PC stuff. You can get an EPIA board for a lot less than an ARM development kit. [I know about power consumption, cost in volume, etc. etc., but for fun small projects, off-the-shelf wins.]

By the way, this guy has solve the problem of how to get 802.11b in a teeny box. The mini-ITX boards don't have PCMCIA and a PCI Wi-Fi card is going to take up a lot of room. Solution: gut a USB Wi-Fi box. The Orinoco one has a teensy USB to PCMCIA interface & a regular Wi-Fi card. Dunno 'bout Linux drivers for it, tho.

All that said, I would like to see a "legacy free" mini-ITX board for building regular-old personal computers.

YHBT YHL HAND DS

unless, of course, that was a serious question about chipset support / compatibility and drivers for the on-board video and audio :-p

There's a Linux section in the FAQ so it should run fine.

The difference, of course, is that you can fit an Xbox in your front room alongside the TV and VCR.

Why do friggin' black desktop cases cost 2-3x what a beige one costs? Black CD and DVD drives cost more too.

Yeah I know, black spray paint. Easier said than done. A case isn't a patio chair.

I want to build a mini-ITX box in an old VCR case, but I keep hearing how bad the perfomance of the CPUs on the mini-ITX motherboards are.

I wish VIA or someone would bring out a mini-ITX motherboard with a TV tuner, DVD decoder and mpeg/Divx encoder/decoder on the board, for ~$150.

Should check out the MiniITX boards from VIA. MiniITX. Smaller than this, and quite efficient. Not really a gamers system though.

Am I a psycho?