mp3 with qbasic?

[potato]

it's like having a pc in your car... why not just connect an old pc and some good speakers to your lighter jack? that cd loading box looks huge

[Plasma]

It basically is a computer in a car...that "CD loading box" is the computer. The box is custom built to fit a baby AT mobo. I even had to remove the brackets on the sound and video cards to fit them in the case. The CD-ROM is suspended an inch above the CPU heatsink. You will not find a smaller computer case for AT motherboards. (Mini-ITX, yes, but that's overkill and I'm not made of money.)

Plus, if you just connected an old pc to your lighter jack (assuming you used an inverter), you'd get horrible distortion over your speakers caused by ground loops. (You need a ground loop isolator...) In addition, how would you plan on controlling the thing? You going to have a keyboard and a monitor up front too?

[Diroga]

so it's a computer in the back with a sound card. you made a program to read the cd and play mulit formats. what motherboard and soundcard are you using?

[potato]

It basically is a computer in a car...that "CD loading box" is the computer. The box is custom built to fit a baby AT mobo. I even had to remove the brackets on the sound and video cards to fit them in the case. The CD-ROM is suspended an inch above the CPU heatsink. You will not find a smaller computer case for AT motherboards. (Mini-ITX, yes, but that's overkill and I'm not made of money.)

Plus, if you just connected an old pc to your lighter jack (assuming you used an inverter), you'd get horrible distortion over your speakers caused by ground loops. (You need a ground loop isolator...) In addition, how would you plan on controlling the thing? You going to have a keyboard and a monitor up front too?

don't they have cars with those now?

[Plasma]

so it's a computer in the back with a sound card

It's more than that. I've got an HD44780 LCD connected to the parallel port (8-bit mode) with inline pots to control brightness/contrast. I used the gameport for the control interface. This requires quite a bit of soldering. If you think this is a "weekend project" think again:
http://nemesisqb.zext.net/osmp3/

The computer also has a video card so that I can grab info from vram and output it on the LCD in realtime with the TSR I wrote.

you made a program to read the cd and play mulit formats.

Again, more than that. I wrote a few different programs to control it in both C and QB, as I said before. I wrote the driver for the LCD output as well. The programs control the entire front-end including menus, saving settings, disk caching, reading ID3/MOD tags, sorting filelists, browsing the CD, controlling the hardware volume, as well as an interface with MSCDEX to play audio CDs. It was not a trivial task. The source code is over 7,000 lines.

what motherboard and soundcard are you using?

The mobo is a DFI P5BTX/L with a Pentium 100 MHz CPU, cooled by an oversized heatsink with no fan. The sound card is a Creative Sound Blaster 16 Vibra ISA CT4170.

don't they have cars with those now?

I assume you are talking about ground loop isolators. No, they are not included with the car. You can buy them for $15-$30.

[Diroga]

how long did it take? did you do it a;; by your self? what is 029.jpg on the site you gave? on the sound card why did you soder the wires on? couldn't you have just used a cable and cut off the pin you didnt need? why do you use a video card?

[Plasma]

It took me almost a year. Yes, I did it entirely by myself. 029.jpg is an 8-bit Panasonic/MKE CD-ROM controller. (I used a 2X MKE drive, which requires a controller card, unlike the newer ATAPI CD-ROMs.)

I soldered wires on the back of the sound card to save space. If I had plugged the connectors into the back, it would take an extra 2-3 inches. This way I could put the back right up next to the edge of the card.

As I said before, I used a video card so that I can grab info from vram and output it on the LCD in realtime. (For example, the frequency spectrum when playing MP3s or the channel display when playing MODs.)

[Diroga]

could you explain the vramLCD thing pelaese?

[potato]

does it skip when you go over a speed bump?

[Plasma]

could you explain the vramLCD thing pelaese?

vram = video ram, the memory on the video card. Everything that you see on your computer monitor is stored in vram. The type of LCD screen that I used has its own memory, which must be updated via the LCD controller. So if I want to display what's on the "computer monitor" (in quotes because there is no monitor connected, it's what would be on the monitor) on the LCD, I have to read it from vram and then send it to the LCD controller over the parallel port.

Without a video card, any byte written to the video segment is discarded (because the memory is not there!), and any byte read from the video segment will return 255. So you can see why a video card is needed.

does it skip when you go over a speed bump?

No, it does not skip at all, even when shaking the CD-ROM drive.