[eddieroger]

This was a nostalgia bomb for me, particularly because I did a project like this in my first car around the same time. In retrospect, it's a miracle my car never exploded, with questionable wiring running from my console to the trunk, and a power inverter / extension cord combo that was also fairly dubious. But the idea of having all my music was too much to pass up for a nascent driver and techie.

My setup was a mini tower encased in translucent green, bungee corded to my trunk's side panels, and a 10-key with a PS2 extender running to my console. I booted straight in to WinAmp and ran plugins to let me pick songs by entering +$NUM+ or variations of that. A few months in, I got a 4x40 LCD so I could see what was playing and so some menu-type things. The most clever move, I thought, was getting a hot swap HDD tray so I could periodically reload the files, and maybe the true crowning achievement was the printout I had up front of what was available. Simpler but much more fun times, because the challenge was the fun part.

[bobchadwick]

Nostalgia bomb here, too! I think this page had to have served as the inspiration for my car MP3 player, even though I don't actually recognize anymore.

Mine was basically a motherboard crammed under the driver's seat of my Ford Festiva, which loaded an MP3 player on boot (can't remember which one unfortunately). I had it set to shuffle my collection, and I'd use the arrow keys on a full sized keyboard to skip tracks. It was powered by an inverter plugged into the cigarette lighter, and to solve some noise issues, I had broken guitar string grounding the motherboard to the seat's mounting hardware.

I have great memories of driving around and listening to bands like Pavement and Smog, which served as my intro to the wonderful world of '90s indie rock. (I'm sure I pirated my entire collection at the time, but over the years I think I've made up for it by buying their albums and seeing them live.)

[hypercube33]

I remember reading boot magazine having a tutorial about how to build a carputer around this time and my mind raced about how awesome that'd be.

[romwell]

>This was a nostalgia bomb for me

Heck, I remember that article from the time it was circulated on Slashdot back in the day.

Looking at the title, I was, like, OMG, was it about that crazy setup where someone wired a desktop PC to play mp3s in a car back when CD players were far, far from being standard?

And lo and behold, yes, it was. I mean, he used an "embedded" system, that's to say - a mini-ITX sized PC with Pentium 166MhZ running Linux.

It's insane that within 5 years, CD players playing MP3-CDs became ubiquitous (way before Flash memory became cheap enough for accessibly priced mp3 players with 1GB memory).

[jimt1234]

I had an aux input on the back of my car stereo wired to a Toshiba laptop shoved into the glovebox of my Chevy Lumina. The laptop ran WinAmp with all my bootleg mp3s. There was no power connection, and laptop batteries were terrible back then, so yeah, I could listen to music for about 20 minutes. Oh, and there was no interaction with the music unless I was at a long stoplight. Anyway, I thought I was Hackerman. LOL