MP3 Car In-depth

MP3 Car In-depth I consider myself a computer junky, although when it comes to hardware, I'm less skilled than some, I still am pretty proficient. The I saw a few problems with making my own MP3 car:

Operating Temperature
Shock on the Hard Drive
Disk corruption
Operating System
Control
Display
Space

Operating Temperature. Hard drives aren't the most tolerable piece of equipment in your computer, in fact they're the most susceptable to heat and cold, operating only at room temperature. I live in Salt Lake City, Utah, it gets pretty cold here during the winter and pretty hot during the summer. I do have a heater in my car (they all do) so after a few minutes, we would be within operational temperature, but my car has no AC (or any other options for that matter), so in the summer, with the interior of the car at a toasty 150 degrees F., the Hard drive would die promptly.
Shock. Hard drives also don't like being jostled, you can literally "crash" the heads against the surface of the disks causing major damage. I needed something that had no physical contact with the storage medium, like an optical storage solution.
Disk corruption. No one wants to have to power down their system a minute or so before turning off the car. I needed an OS or storage media that wouldn't corrupt the media if i turned it off in the middle of an MP3. some people had used DOS to do this, but coupled with the other two problems I knew that I would need to use CD-R's as my storage medium.
Operating Stystem. I can do Windows. In fact, even though this page is hosted on a Mac server, I'm writing it in Microsoft Word pad on Windows NT Server. The only problem is that although windows provides an adequate desktop OS, I'm not familiar enough with it's nuances to customize it in the way I needed, plus, you can't run GUI off a CD. The choice was clearly Mac OS, I was able to strip it down to 30 MB (could have been only 12MB, but I added some extra stuff for a better U.I.) AND it runs great off a CD. I guess I could have done Linux, but I can't even figure out how to install it on my PC with my non-standard video card.
Control. How was I going to control this thing? i didn't want to have to lug around a key board, and with the Mac OS, you can't function without a mouse. SO it was either use a laptop keypad and a track-ball, or figure something else out. I realized I could use the MacAlly "Batwing" SNES-type game controller I had bought at FutureShop's going out of business sale for $10. You can customize it's 7 buttons and thumb pad to any keyboard combination you want, so I made a play, stop, skip and other buttons, plus, hit a special button and it controls the mouse! cha-ching!
Display. I didn't want to install a 14" CRT in my Geo Metro, so I decided to use a scan converter and an LCD video monitor. Found an LCD screen on E-Bay that works perfectly. Then i bought an AverKey iMicro box. It converts a VGA signal to composite, S-Video or SCART, and it only cost $76 at Buy.com Plus I can use it to play Marathon on my TV if I want!
Space. Like I said, my car is a Geo Metro, space is at a premium in this car and the "trunk" is taken up entirely by my sub-woofer. The thing had to fit under the driver seat or in the dash. Try finding a computer THAT small! As far a Mac's go, the smallest they ever went was the LC type "pizza box", but to run MP3's I needed a RISC PowerPC-based computer and the LC was 68040 based, didn't even have a math co-processor. The next smallest, with PowerPC, was the 62xx/63xx computers, I found a 100Mhz Performa 6290CD on e-bay and won the bid by $0.25 with 3 seconds to go! (thanks to apple's new network time server option in MacOS 8.5). This computer is pretty small, but still about 3 inches too high and about 6 inches too long. So I decided to remove the un-necessary components, like the hard drive. Now I have and empty 6290 case (I'm thinking of using it for something too, but I can't decide what) and a mother board, a 8XCD drive, the power supply, the iMicro and a bunch of cables connected to my stereo.It takes up 1/3 of the space of the original computer and fits nicely under my seats with room to spare.

So here's the synopsis:
I have a stripped down Macintosh Performa 6290 booting MacOS 8.5 off a CD with the MP3's on the CD as well. I have a second CD that allwos me to change the disc without having to power down, plus I can play regular redbook-audio CDs as well. It's controlled by a MacAlly "Batwing" game pad that doubled as the Mouse and Keyboard. The MP3's are played by clicking the appropriate play-list (which are displayed in "button mode" so you only have to click once) and automatically play. The screen is a 2.9 inch Citizen LCD video monitor connected by an Averkey iMicro that has Hardware zooming and panning, I also have Apple's Close-view assigned to the right top button on the Batwing for software zooming and panning (more choppy, but auto panning). The LCD screen and the iMicro both run on 7.5V DC, so the computer is the only thing running on the DC>AC power inverter.

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