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Home Theater: The Home Theater Macintosh Project Continued
Thursday, 2004 March 11 - 5:04 pm
I'm getting more ambitious with my Home Theater Macintosh project. Here are some updates.

At first, my only intention was to connect an old Macintosh to my HDTV, and to use it as a music jukebox. But I've gotten more ambitious lately. Now, I'm also turning this Mac into a DVR and wireless web surfing machine, making it a full-fledged media center.

This Mac started life as a Blue and White "Yosemite" Power Macintosh G3. It is now no longer blue and white; I took it apart and painted the blue panels using metallic black spray paint. There are a few important notes for those of you who might try this at home. First, the Mac comes apart fairly easily, except the side panels (which require some work to undo the clips in the center of the panels). However, it's highly likely that you'll break off some of the little plastic tabs that hold things together (especially on the faceplate bezels). It's also possible you might strip some of the hex-key screws that hold the panels on, because they don't seem to quite be the right size for my standard set of Allen wrenches. You may break the plastic Apple logos if you try to pry them off the side panels; they're glued on tight, and they can get brittle with age. Finally, the first coat of paint that you apply needs to be very light, to prevent the paint from pooling and cracking on the slick plastic surface. (I ended up with four coats of paint, with the last one being a wet coat.)

So paint job done, I upgraded the processor from a 400 MHz G3 to a 500 MHz G4 from Other World Computing. The machine still seemed slow; using the benchmarking program "XBench", I determined that the hard drive was the bottleneck. The thing with these Revision 1 Yosemite machines is that they had buggy IDE drive controllers, and so certain third-party hard drives were limited to the slower "multi-word DMA" mode instead of "ultra-DMA". So, I bought an Acard PCI IDE controller card and connected the drive there. The drive was still slow, though; I figured this might be because it was originally formatted while connected to the bad IDE controller, so the driver may still have been set to multi-word DMA. Reformatting the drive might have fixed things, but I decided to just ahead and install a new 120GB hard drive while I was at it. That did the trick; my XBench hard drive score is around 100 now (before, it was in the teens). So now I have a pretty respectably fast machine (not bad considering that it's six years old!).

Another aspect of having a home theater Mac is that one doesn't want to be tethered to it with a mouse and keyboard. After much searching, I found a used MacAlly iWebKey wireless keyboard. I wanted this one because it's compact and Mac-compatible, and it was only $30 used. Officially, it's not supported under Mac OS X, but I found I could tweak the iMediaKey keyboard driver to make it work. (I found a useful tip on macosxhints about this.) I also have, on order, an ATI Remote Wonder to use as a remote control, and then an Elgato Systems EyeTV box to use for TV recording. Everything should be here by the end of the week; stay tuned for more reports on how this all works!
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Posted by Ken in: techwatch

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