this is a direct quote from an mp3car.com bbs

"If it is the memory comming out of its slot, then find a small rope or something to tie it down tightly"

don't know about you guys, but i am extremely happy i went with the empeg rather than some homegrown player.

12 gig, green...

HAAAARRRR HAAARRRR HAAAR HAAARR...... Oh dear, I've had an accident

One of the few remaining Mk1 owners... #00015

In reply to:

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mp3car.com bbs

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You have just got to have a look at this picture. The quote which goes with it is "looks much better in person jsut a bad pic".

Nice drilled aluminium pedals too (where was that Riceboy link again?).

ROFL. LOL. LOL. ROFL. [FX gasps for breath].

Nick.

OK. Now that I've composed myself. Let me say that I have the utmost respect for anybody who goes out and builds their own kit. I certainly don't have the motivation to do so. However, I would be sooooo embarrassed to have that mess in my car. Ho well, dif'rent strokes I suppose.


--
18Gb blue (now AR red) - s/n 080000299 (original queue position 8724)

thats what i call a reall steath installation. seriously, don't people realize just how tacky it looks to have a keypad hanging off of your dash? i really like the "mount my inverter in my cupholder" technique.

12 gig, green...

LOL

Kit says, "Please enter you command, Micheal...."
1,3,6,5 Enter
Kit: "You have selected - HyperMegaDeathRay, please enter firing code..."
6,6,6 Enter
Kit: "Firing HyperMegaDeathRay...."

uh, oh, now what was the ignition sequence....

Smoker_Man
#080000449 MkII - 36Gb Blue

Nice drilled aluminium pedals too (where was that Riceboy link again?).

Isn't that the VGA-connector?

TeeMcBee
Got my Mk2! # 080000143

The guy installed racing pedals meant for heel-toe on an automatic car. How dumb is that? What is the point? That scores him very high up on the rice boy ranking.

Calvin

ROFL

___________
Tony Fabris

The guy installed racing pedals meant for heel-toe on an automatic car. How dumb is that?

Awww, Calvin -- you malign him unfairly.

The substantial weight savings involved in drilled out pedals will take nanoseconds off of his 0-60 acceleration times!

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

Actually if you look carefully, those pedals are the kind that strap onto existing pedals. So although they are drilled, they are sitting on top of the original pedals so overall they add weight.

Calvin

So I take it that no one here is a "rice-boy", since no one is defending the cross-drilled pedals.

I'm not.

Proud Owner of MK2 080000558 - 18gb Blue

Hey all,

First off I must say I love the empeg and I can't wait till I can afford one :-) But my current set up is nice and not tacky, well at least I don't think so :-P Take a look for yourself. http://home.ici.net/~krh/mp3sol.htm The only thing I do like is when I do get my empeg I'm gonna loose the DVD and GPS I've added to this one. But the way I see it is someone will write some software fro me to be able to add it to the empeg someday :-)
-Keith

But my current set up is nice and not tacky,

I agree.

Now, it's easy for me to sit back and criticise, but please don't think I am disparaging your efforts. I started to build something similar for my car and very quickly realized that I was getting in so far over my head that I would have needed scuba gear just to ever see the light of day again. To coin a phrase, "You're a better man than I am, Gunga Din!"

I think about the only nit I can pick with your installation is the amount of usable space taken up by the computer itself. You have such limited storage to start with with a Del Sol, and to give up half of it... My (fortunately aborted!) plans were to build a small wooden box using a special motherboard in which the daughter boards were oriented in the same plane as the mother board -- the whole thing would have been about the size of a double-din, with the power supply external. I was not going to use an inverter, but planned to build a switching power supply to generate my +5 and +12V for the computer. I had actually gone as far as sourcing all the parts I would need, and realized that the display would be a killer (I found out that you can't just salvage the display from an old '286 laptop and make it work) and further realized that the software would be impossible, when I found the empeg site and saved my sanity.

Do you actually play your music using Winamp? Do you do that using that full-sized keyboard you had in the pictures? Where do you keep your keyboard when it is not in use?

How much music capacity to you have on board?

About how much money do you think you spent, not counting the DVD and the GPS?

It is good to see someone who actually went ahead and really built his own in-car MP3 system. As I'm sure you found out, it isn't as easy to do as a lot of the people who have never done it would think!

tanstaafl.

"There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"

I'm impressed as well, and echo tanstaafl's post.

Also, is that IR receiver perchance the irman? Hehe, I use that thing too for my home-made home MP3 player. Regardless of company, what program are you using for the IR commands? I'm very fond of Girder, which gives you control of an incredible amount of Windows features, including the control of a program regardless of whether it's in the foreground or not.

I can see the GPS receiver retaining its usefullness after you've gotten an empeg. I'm sure you'll be able to figure something out.

DiGNAN

Let's see, cross-drilled pedals are used to improve ventilation of driver's feet, sweaty from heath of race, right?

Dragi "Bonzi" Raos
Zagreb, Croatia
Q#5196, MkII#80000376, 18GB green

alright. i didn't mean to sound so harsh. i am in no way bashing all diyers who have built their own players. in fact, i have seen some really nice ones that i would love to have. stuff like gps, dvd, etc. ashley powers is a prime example. he decided that the empeg was not for him, built his own player, and it looks amazing. i actually tried to adapt his ideas to my miata, but wisely gave up. like tantaasfal said, i would have needed scuba gear to get out. praise be to the empeg gods.

what really bothers me are people that build their own then compare them with the empeg and declare theirs better. many times their arguments sound like this. "i can build an mp3 player for $200. only an idiot would pay $1200 for an empeg." this is where the homebuilt problems come in. most of these people know a bit about computers and a bit about car audio. this is where you get solutions like tying memory down to the motherboard. this is where you get people saying that you have to disable scandisk after bad shutdowns, mount hard drives vertically, etc. all of this is from a quality standpoint. a quality player should not have to have its memory secured to the mobo with string. a quality player should not have to worry about shutting the player off in the middle of use (this is pretty much by definition in an auto environment). the list goes on and on.

then there are features. i, for one, do not want to pick all of my songs using some random PIN. i certainly do not want to do that with a keypad hanging out of the dash. i do not want to have to use some sort of mouse remote and take my eyes off the road to pick music. i dont always want just a 2000 song playlist in random mode, sometimes i want to pick specific playlists and artists safely.

building your own player is fine, and even commendable. it takes time, hard work, and dedication. just dont say the empeg is stupid because yours costs $xxx less than an empeg (i realise you, mystkrh, weren't saying this :). the empeg does not have inherent design flaws from trying to graft a stationary desktop computer into a portable automobile environment. the empeg has the features that i want, namely access to any song or artist, or album in a matter of seconds.

sorry about the length. just want to make sure everyone knows that i am not putting down homebuilt systems.

jeremy

12 gig, green...

I have race pedals in my car,and in their defense, they work rather well to position the brake and gas pedal very close together for heel-toe. The original brake and gas pedals were very small and very far apart. :-) After becoming acustomed to using those pedals I tried going without and it was simply much more awkward to drive.

I don't see the purpose of putting them on an automatic car, because then it's attempting to look like you have a manual transmission.

Calvin