Too keep myself busy I have decided to build a Macintosh Mini.

I'm going to use the old carputer ATX-2 power supply since it is small in size and for the moment a standard micro ATX motherboard.
The case I'm planing to use is my old Xbox case. Since my Xbox died I striped it down and started grinding off the old mounts/stand offs.

The case can hold the motherboard and power supply perfectly. I'm planning to use a laptop based optical drive and hard drive. For the time being this will not be a Hackintosh but a dumb terminal until I can locate another Celeron CPU for the motherboard I want to use. For now it's a AMD Sepron system. Since PC motherboards are swapable this would be a quick change when the time comes. Tomorrow i'll start posting pics of the build.

Mounting the hardware will be easy as cake. Just use a white marker and mark the mounting holes then use some screws and a few nuts. The tricky part is the optical drive since I want to use the OEM placement, i'll just fab up a tray and some mounts out of sheet metal. Since the northbridge on both motherboards are at the same location I can't use a desktop optical drive due to the massive heatsinks. I'll play with it anyway, last thing I want is gaps or the use of bondo or fiberglass on this project.

Nice. Looking forward to this thing's completion.

Well I was hoping that I didn't have to pull out the fiberglass but I broke off a chunk of the case I wanted to keep.






This shot has just a random motherboard I grabbed out of the closet.

I haven't touched it since yesterday but I have gotten a few ideas to try tomorrow or should I say later today since it's almost 1am.

I've started installing the mounts for the motherboard and power supply. It just hit me. I broke the top to the case cover months ago. I was wondering why I couldn't find it. I guess i'll ether hunt down a broken xbox off of ebay or just buy a used one from EB games since the xbox is dirt cheap these days.

I need to pull out the soldiering iron and start on the front panel circuit. Going to have power and optical buttons and use the backlit LED as a hard drive indicator. I'm thinking to add a reset button but have it located on the back of the unit and also have a main power switch kinda like the PS2/3.

To fix the screw up on the back of the case I'm going to make a template out of cardboard then wrap it with foil and pull out the fiberglass. I'll play with the fiberglass on Sunday.

Where are you now with it?

It's on hold. Started on a joint project with a member in my car club on building a better/cheaper car computer system.

Looking back on it kinda scares me since there will be a lot of fiberglass work needed.