Hi All,

Long time reader but not much of a poster as you can see from my stats and lack of Avatar, Doesnt mean i dont love my macs or this place... ahh just makes me shy

I am a horder (collecter of everthing, thrower away of nothing!) so looking at my spare parts bin i found i have "probably" everything i need for a CarMac.

Parts i have,

iMac DV 500 logic board
2x 128mb sdram
80gig IDE HD
PSone Screen (those playstation screens that attach to the back of em)

assorted wires and powersupplys and stuff lying around as well...

Well the idea was to mount the PSone screen in the car with the other stuff in the boot (its a VW so boot will be in front of car (i know headless iMacs had trouble running long vga cables with loss of video)

Basicaly the PSone screens can be modded to take vga input, buuuut the catch is that the hz or refresh rate has to be clocked waaay down to 15hz. My main question is this possible for the iMac to output this? and the second problem is the display would only be in 640x480 can OS X be run like this?

The main thing it would be used for is iTunes and possibly some video via VLC with some hotkeys used to bring up each and cycle thru without having needs for a whole keyboard and mouse affair.

Well if your looking at any such mod yourself This is the link for how the lil thing to accept vga.

Thanks for any input

The video in the iMac was ATI Rage chipset, so you could try...

640x480 is no problem, but I'd have no idea about 15hz. I'd rig it up and see if it works. Otherwise, you can find car video screens on ebay for reasonable prices even new.

If you do an install, please do take copious photos and do a write up. We'd be very happy to stick it in our articles section.

Yeah i was looking to do it as cheap as possible hence old parts, maybe i could find someway to get AV from the iMac? the video quality would be worse but still keeping parts...

Will give this a go, and take heaps of photos if it all goes to plan, ill be sure to post it

How are you planning on dealing with all the bumps and rattles that come from in a car? How are you going to mount it in the car basically?

Also how are you going to transfer music to the computer?

Well being a volkswagen with a steel dash i was going to bolt the display directly to the dash, run all the wiring behind with the case (probably a old atx case fixed to boot floor) and maybe mount the a dvd drive in the glovebox.

Would probably transfer music to it via my ipod.

Could probably save alot of trouble and fix some ipod kit to the car... but then again that wouldnt be cool!

www.mp3car.com have a mac section, mainly based on mini's thou, some awesome installls, worth a look just for the pics

i was going to commit to this a while back, but then i realized a)i don't have the time and B) i don't have the cash...

My plan was mac mini, in dash, with a 7" touch screen flipping out from the din slot beneath it.

but it would cost nearly 2000 bucks for that and an amp an everyhting else so i pissed it off!