Doing Redshark, my car media player project, with a repurposed Xbox console was an interesting hack inspired by convenience, but I’d be the first to tell you that it’s far from the best solution. Indeed, it has some pretty huge problems:

• Slow boot time (Could be mitigated somewhat by tuning my Gentoo boot process)
• Power-hungry, and, therefore, hot
• Painfully gigantic in size

I’ve been thinking about a version 2 that would be more compact, more power-efficient, and would provide a better user experience.

A company called BuffaloTech makes an adorable little machine called a Kuro Box (link is to Tom’s Hardware, manufacturer’s site currently down). It runs some flavor of embedded PowerPC CPU, and has all sorts of useful IO like IDE, onboard networking, and USB2. It’s specifically designed with hardware hackers in mind; all the code’s open and you can tinker with it to your heart’s delight. It boots from Flash, which means near-instantaneous starts, and it runs on some sort of customized Linux kernel. It doesn’t have audio hardware on board, but it is confirmed to work with an external USB audio interface. It also has pretty low power requirements, as PowerPC systems tend to be. It’s less powerful than an XBox, but I think it would have more than enough grunt to play music and work the Redshark UI. With a power supply swap to make it run off of 12V, and a beefy hard disk added, I think it would make a greatly superior Redshark v2.

Hmm. Must find some resources related to procedural texturing and geometry. I have a game concept I’d like to mock up.