iPodMaxi

In time of extreme electronic components miniaturisation and the search for the latest tecno-gadget, there are a few people who spend their time in find a use for old PC hardware...
Beside simple phylosophy and the amount of time required for useful and at the same time satisfactory activities, the idea of using an old PC as a mp3 reader is not mine...

The case you see here houses an old pentium 1 MMX at 133MHz, with an ISA audio card, 2 old hard disks (8GB total space), a CD-ROM reader, a PCI LAN card, a LCD display and a remote unit connected in the keyboard input for controlling the mp3 reader. The control unit is in fact a "little keyboard" and for its construction i recycled an old keyboard contol unit, reconstructing the matrix keys

The system runs MS-DOS 5, and uses a software called MPXPLAY, which supports natively the output on an 2x20 LCD. It display the id3 tag and the directories/drives for navigations.
All the components are recovered from old apparatus, and the total cost of this mp3 reader was 3-4 euro for the LCD display and the white paint for the case
Unfortunately, DOS 5 doesn't support neither long file names not FAT32. The hard disk have to be formatted with FAT file system, which means that the largest partition is 2 GB... I tried to install DOS 7.1, but in no way i was able to set up a LAN connection with WinXP.... If you have some solutions, please tell me!

This PC is connected in a LAN with my main PC which runs WIN XP, and it is possible to transfer mp3 files from the main PC to the mp3 reader. (making the LAN connection between DOS and WINXP was not easy at all!!)

In thi ZIP file yo uwill find all the files in the system disk of my mp3 reader, as well as the schematic for the LCD connection, if you want to make your own mp3 reader!!

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