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"