winamp plugins..

Kali

After recently discovering that winamp plugins work off the soundcards line-in, I've got the idea of building a cheap/quiet machine to connect to my amp... (my god to have Geiss/Milkdrop or Smoke running non-stop.. wow.. its the end of all things lavalampy as we know it)

I'm thinking along the lines of a high-end P2, 64/128mb ram with any Geforce (or I've a spare tnt2 anyway).. with a decent monitor capable of something along the lines of the gateways fine picture mode.. which basically is a high contrast ratio mode (e.g. blacks are BLACK).. meaning it won't illuminate the whole room when the monitor is on.

Anyway.. regarding the quiet bit I'll wander back to that old thread, but need to know one or two things..

Do the majority of pentium-II boards have AGP?
How are they regards cooling, do they need a fan on non-stop?
And would that spec. be sufficient for the plugins above? (I've tried on a P166 with a 2mb graphics card and they run in low-res at a bearable speed, those plugins are extremely well coded anyway..)
Anything I'm missing? Soundcard wouldn't be an issue.. surely as long as it has line-in it'll pass through grand to the program?
I'm also presuming 98SE on that spec machine will throw directx around the quickest (and directsound)..
Any cheap monitor reccomendations would be handy.. (flat-screened & a contrast mode being the only two criteria).. i'm thinking of picking up a brand new monitor and just using my gateway vx700, I don't know if the 15" equivalent has the contrast mode..

err.. end of rant/idea.. comments appreciated..

Gerry

Good idea, its something I might do in the future myself.
Most standard p2 boards will have agp, its only really the boards from slimline business machines which may be missing it.

As regards cooling, well I think you will need a low speed fan running, but it could be so quiet as to be unnoticeable. For even lower heat, you could try and pick up a low speed p3 coppermine ( say 500 - 600 ), and you may be able to get away with a big passive heatsink. If you found that you could get away with a lower cpu speed, you could underclock the cpu and so run cooler.

I think the spec would be sufficient, those plugins use 3d hardware acceleration so you should be fine.

I wouldn't say win2k is noticeably slower for directx, its certainly not slower for opengl. I wouldn't want the machine crashing, certainly. It may be worth benchmarking with both. Keep us posted on progress anyways.

Kali

been playing around with this all evening with my main machine .. p3-600 gf440.. which is actually more than enough for any of the above plugins.. (fps had to be limited), looks hella sweet after set up properly.. nice to be able to see geiss work on radio broadcasts as well as cds.

for anyone trying it ... just point winamps "play location" to line://
took me a while to figure that one out
the line-in recording volume needed a bit of tweaking before i was happy with it (waveforms were maxing out mid-frequency).. and i spent a bit of time giving geiss's various presets ratings (so the ****ty ones don't appear as often)...

on infra-red keyboards..i see lidl are selling these hella cheap.. anyone know if learning remotes can replace these (in general not just the lidl ones)? as just having the ir-receiver work with the new marantz remote i'm thinking of getting would be ideal..

noise wasn't too much of a problem.. considering your listening to music, but your right gerry the p3 is pretty damn quiet when theres no hard disk access (which the plugins don't need at all).. although my cheap budget for this project ~250 wouldn't really stretch to a coppermine

Gerry

Well, I know someone who picked up a p3 600e on the for sale board for 30 euro (roughly). You could try a wanted ad for a chip and suitable board.