Re: Audacity and Gentoo

On 2006-01-14, Nix <nix-razor-pit@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 1U -> good cooling, but alas
> 1U -> noisy
>
> (small fan syndrome...)

Small *fast* fan syndrome, two small fans running much slower wouldn't
make anywhere near as much noise so I'll probably replace the small
fan with either another one with a heat-sensitive controller, or
a larger number of slower fans.

When I build some 1U servers I'll use mini-itx boards to minimise the
cooling requirements, sommat like a 600MHz or so would do fine. The
hard discs would need more cooling than the motherboard but ISTR that
you can tune newer drives to make less racket and a side effect of it
is that they heat up less, but I'll look into it more before I buy
anything.

> I've heard of people doing things like that. How hard is it to set up,
> anyway?

Making a MAME cab is easy, I bought a scruffy cabinet for £50 on ebay,
which came with two joysticks, 5 buttons for each player two player
start buttons, the monitor, power supplies and all the wiring. From
there you have a number of options, you can get a JAMMA converter
which plugs directly into the circuitry of JAMMA-standard cabinets and
then to your PC. That's pretty much it for that route I think, I
didn't go that route myself.

I bought a controller board called an I-PAC that has lots of screw
terminals along one edge, and two keyboard connectors on the other.
You connect the labelled terminals to the joystick microswitches, plug
a supplied keyboard lead into the computer and into the IPAC, and a
normal keyboard into the other port on the IPAC. Waggling the
joysticks then simulates keypresses that correspond to the default
MAME keys. I replaced most of the microswitches though.

Then I ripped the old TV-resolution monitor out of the cabinet (I hate
old monitors, they're dodgy) and replaced it with a 19" multisync,
wired up the sound card to the cabinet's speakers, installed linux and
xmame and that's pretty much it.

There are now a wide variety of USB control panels you can buy with
things like trackballs and analogue joysticks on, I'll get around to
building my own cabinet one day, I decided to cut my teeth on a simple
setup with a ready-made cabinet until I knew what I wanted. The first
I-PAC has also spawned several successors and imitators so there's a
lot more choice now than there was 4 years ago when I set mine up.

Then it's just a case of tuning the software. Old versions of MAME
are best, they run fewer games but run them much quicker due to the
delicate line the MAME devs tread to avoid being sued. If you want
more info, pop over to alt.games.mame but check the FAQ first and
don't under any circumstances mention 3D accelerator cards!

> I suppose arcade games don't really need high-quality displays :)

This is for my PVR box, 800x600, I can easily run a 132x41 character
xterm on it and post to news and read email, which is exactly what I'm
doing right now, sitting about 10 feet away from the screen. The
arcade cabinet's not big enough for a 37" screen.

> Yeah. I'm pushing my noisiest box into the loft soon: I've had enough
> of the Netra's jet-engine whine.

Be careful that doesn't make it worse! If it's mounted on boards, you
can get a rumbling in the room below that's even more annoying, and
the noise from the fans travels through the loft and into the rooms
below as there's no walls to dampen it so the noise is similar in
every room. That's what I found in the last house I was in but
obviously it varies from house to house. I got some thick foam and
mounted an old Compaq Proliant I had at the time on that, which helped.

> I'd really like cooling with no moving parts, but everything I've found
> that works that way either involves massive banks of Peltier arrays (and
> then you have to get all the heat away from *them*, which means more
> fans), or liquid cooling, generally with *water*, which strikes me as
> utterly bloody stupid unless you really want electrical fires, short
> circuits, an algae farm and low reliability.

It's not really a problem if you don't need fast CPUs, although a
passive-cooled machine inside a rack would probably best have a slow
fan due to the reduced air flow.

> ! Where on earth do you live? The top of a mountain?

Dorset, in a fairly windy part!

> Lustre is what some of the Coda hackers wrote after they wrote
> Intermezzo (and then stalled that, annoying, it looked nice but never
> really went anywhere).

Intermezzo rings a bell, I suspect that's what I was looking at
instead of Coda, I'll just wait until they make their minds up ;-)

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!
.

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