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Firstly, the power section.

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Well, an inverter doesn't cost that much... it's not elegant, but it could work.

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I'll give you a free hint - look at using UPS softare and the serial port.

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UPS is totally over the top... car systems supply permanent and switched supplies... just power it off the permanent, and hook up a simple circuit to the serial port for when the switched supply goes off, triggering a shutdown. Works in all cases except someone disconnecting the battery when the unit is on.

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Hard drives.

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Cost of laptop drives isn't really a valid point, as a 10gig drive can be picked up pretty cheap, and anything bigger hits the empeg owner as much as it does the home-build owner.

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Display.

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Again, I might disagree here.. Of course, it depends on what you want to do, but a simple text display can be had for pretty cheap (see crystalfontz.com and matrixorbital.com for examples) and is plenty wide-angled enough - you don't need much more than 50 degrees horizontally, and most LCDs are vertically limited, not horizontally.

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Next you'll need to buy an IRMan for $50ish

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Or use the onboard PC irda header that virtually all motherboards have, along with suitable software, and any remote you want (i.e. the kenwood model sold with early empegs)

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Presuming you want your unit to boot up in under 10 seconds, you will need to get a motherboard that allows flash to be used.

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I imagine some kind of standby mode could be used that would resume in a short amount of time (10-15 secs, maybe) and would be capable of being run off the car battery for a few days without problems.

Not that I'm knocking the empeg at all - there's no way you could build a system as good as the empeg from off-the-shelf componentry. And you'd still have to write a *lot* of software. But it's too easy to knock the home-brew people too much - don't forget that the empeg concept started out like that. These problems can, on the whole, be solved, to some degree at least.

I would strongly disagree that you'd have a unit anything like as integrated and easy-to-use as the empeg, though. But maybe some people don't need that. I was personally looking at building a system like this from an old laptop - not because I thought it'd be ever anywhere NEAR the empeg in terms of quality, features, and downright WOWness, but because at the time, there was no way I could afford an empeg.

Of course, it's significantly easier to say 'I could build a unit that could do all that and play DVDs for $500'. To build it, within the budget, and sit down and write all the software needed to make it work, is a much harder task.

A.