The netgear 314 I had in my closet is actually a re-branded ZyXEL Prestige 314. This is nice as it comes with a serial terminal interface already set up. By inserting this router into your network between your router and the upstream port you can easily set up a syslog rebroadcaster to a linux box on your network. That's the easy way.....

As I also had an old Palm V sitting around, I figured it'd be more fun to do it the hard way. There's an old serial terminal program for palm called ptelnet that I recommend. It has macro functionality, so also I recommend setting your macros to be your favorite system info commands for the Zyxel interface (net show tables, ip address, etc).

If you've got a null modem cable around (f-f adapter) you can plug straight in. Otherwise you'll have to roll your own. Lucky for us the serial protocol only needs 3 lines (power, rx, tx (pins 2,3,5)). The netgear expects hardware flow control to be on, so you'll also need to bridge those lines as well (pins 7,8). I used paper clips (dangerous!!!!), but I would recommend using shielded wires.

Once you've got all your pins connected (or swapped depending on your cabling..), fire up your terminal emulator and power on your router. You're all set to get all sorts of nice statistics your ISP may not want you knowing about.

As I head out to my usual electronics warehouse (the venice women's council thrift store), I had envisioned building the nes from the necessary parts pulled from old consoles, pda's etc. I ended up finding a children's keyboard to tv adapter which came with a plug-in mouse and controller. For 10$, it seemed like a good candidate for chips. Ripping it open, before my eyes appeared a cartridge connector. My NES carts did not fit. They were the wrong size.. by about 12 pins.. Sounds about like. a famicom! Yep. Some company decided to save a $ and implemented a learning device based on the now insanely cheap to produce 1mhz famicom. I slapped it back together with a little hot glue, and that's that! Abolut the size of 3 famicom carts stacked, it's been fun playing the few famicom games I can understand. The hackaway pile for this year is getting bigger all the time!.

The animation on the games is pretty good, better than I was expecting. The "touch screen" is actually just a 4-way rocker. Pretty fun way to control games, but obscures the screen for no good reason. It takes 3x aaa batteries, no word yet on battery life as they're still holding a good charge. You can pop off the battery case with a small screwdriver or coin. After which you can pop off the front blue bezel, which exposes 4 small screws holding in the mobo. You pop this out just like an eee mobo (one pin, careful with the ports). Looks like it's running a samsung-831 firmware, K9G8G08UOB pcbo nand. No transistors between the battery compartment and the mobo, taking straight 4.5v. Plays mp3, wav, and ogg. Another potential rockbox target?

I bought an 50$ 2g surf on ebay that was missing a screen. There's not that many ways you can upgrade this machine, it's only got 256 megs of ram soldered onto the board, and the system bus is extra slow. But the wifi chipset is mini-pci, so I replaced the wifi with a bcm decoder 70012 chip. I also picked that up from ebay hong kong (20$), and installed xbmc on xp-nlite to fit on the 2 gigabyte ssd also soldered onto the board. The 800mhz celeron and slow system bus don't seem to want to play most 1080p vids, without stuttering, but most 720p runs fine. So I can rip my blue-ray to standard x264, throw it on a thumb drive and play it anywhere that's got a vga connector. And it only uses 20 watts. And it's throwing up 720p and completely powering those speakers and the os and the ssd and usb stick it's reading from. 15 watts while booting. You could probably do that with a hand dynamo. Which I'll probably try to set up with a usb powered pico projector in the near future. That'll be the next vid perhaps? Gotta love ebay./

1. You'll need to be running some flavor of *nix (self=ubuntu), with perl installed
2. You'll need to have xscreensaver set up as your screensaver (though it should be simplicity itself to do this for most any other screensaver)
3. You'll need to have zsnes installed
4. You'll have to supply your own roms (legality), and record your own rom state movies in zsnes (simple simple!)

And that's about all you'll need. Just open up your ~/.xscreensaver file and put an entry for snesaver.pl (should be in your path) under the "programs" section. Then edit the script to point to /your/rom/directory/structure/ and you're all set.

Here's a youtube video of it in action.

/H