Hi everyone, I'm new to this forum, I've been reading it for a few months and have decided to join. I am going to begin work on a new mod projcet- A g3 beige media center.

I want to put a g3 logic board into an old stereo/VCR case, and have it be a nice quiet media center for music in the living room.

The specs of the machine will be:

g3 300mhz (just about right for playing music0
512mb PC 100 memory
2x 80 gb hard drives
Front USB ports
Itunes 4 or greater

I plan to scrap the CD rom/floppy drives, in favor of USB removable storage.
The system is going to hold my music collection of around 1000 songs. I want to make the media center small enough so it will fit in a 2 u rack space....,so I have a few questions....


1. Can I use a generic 1U ATX power supply? I don't plan to draw too much power from the system, just enough to power the logic board and 2x 80 gb hard drives.

2. I also want to make the media center a print server... Is there a good printer utility I can use to manage a USB printer over the network?

3. Whats the best way to cut plastic? with a jig saw?


thanks for the advice, I appreciate it, and hope to post here often! 

i have a 333mhz Beige i was going to use as a back up server for my 7 other computers. The awesome thing about the biege is that it can use just about any standard ATX PSU (there is a jumper on the motherboard you have to change, it's by the PCI card slots.) As far as sound goes you could try to cram it in the case with the onboard sound from the ISA card, or add a USB PCI card and add a USB soundcard to it. Like the iMic or any others that are available. For use as just a music/print server the biege will do quite well. It can still handle OSX jaguar, though i'm not sure which version of iTunes will work. Anyhow good luck and such.

macDeviant

On cutting the plastic it depends how think it is. If it's thin enough that you can easily warp then use a razor. If it's hard and thick then use a jigsaw or dremal.

thanks for the replys. I didn't think of using USB audio, thanks for the idea! yeah, that will save a lot of space and make it look cooler also... I have a spare iMic I'll be using!