NES Retro Media Center

Sorry for not beeing so active here. I have been working on my OpenBSD router/firewall built on an Alix 2d3 board with flashdist. For the media center The future is looking very good! Just look at Fit PC2 and P710-HD!

The VIA Surfboard C855 meets this demand by providing flawless playback of high bit-rate 1080p HD video, which along with support for internal display resolutions of up to 1366 x 768 pixels and external display resolutions up to 1920 x 1440 pixels, the latest high definition VIA Vinyl Audio, and a wide range of connectivity options, allows for a rich on-the-go multimedia experience.

The future is looking bright! VIA is now presenting a new platform called Trinity and Nvidia have taken up the competition. Enjoy!

It is not every day VIA releases new products. The 27 of June 2008 VIA released a new Pico-ITX board called EPIA-P700. Only thing that is missing for my project is that it do not support HDTV. It is also possible to read that new Mini-ITX v2.0 boards will be released in the fourth quarter of 2008.

• VIA EPIA-P700
• VIA Press Room 2008

Here are some pictures of the NES case that I promised before. You can find more pictures in the Image Gallery.

Now I have the NES disassembled and all the measurements ready. Roughly the inside mesures 22cm x 17cm x 7cm.

So now it is time to choose what motherboard to use, Pico-ITX, Nano-ITX or Mini-ITX. Here is where all the fun begins!

• Pico-ITX: 10cm x 7.2cm
• Nano-ITX: 12cm x 12cm
• Mini-ITX: 17cm x 17cm

The requirement is that it manages to play HDTV and have DVI, HDMI or Component out. And in the other projects that I have found a Mini-ITX has been used so for the fun of it I will not use a Mini-ITX motherboard. At the moment I am almost 100% sure that I will use a Nano-ITX board called: EPIA-NX12000EG . But I will probably change my mind many times before this project is finish :)

Since one of the main goals is to have a low power consumtion the hard drive can be a problem. I will use a Compact Flash to IDE adapter with a Compact Flash card of 2GB for the Operating System, (Freebsd) which mostly will be in idle. For storage I will use 2x500GB SATA/300 Seagate Barracuda who I will spin down when not in use to save power.