As promised, here are some wrap-up pictures for project Gemini!  First of all, I spent a little time doing some simple cable management in the case. The Node 605 really has no space for cable management to speak of, but fortunately they at least included some Velcro cable wraps. I bound up the SATA/ATX power with one:  And the SATA/misc power cables with another between the PSU and the Ceton card:  This should at least allow for some good air flow, and keep anything from rattling or making contact. I also bound up the CPU fan cables by wrapping them around the Noctua fans along with the low noise adapters and the 8 pin CPU power:  I went with the Low Noise Adapters as opposed to the Ultra Low Noise Adapters, as I found the L.N.A.'s to be essentially silent anyway. I also replaced the cheapo blue LED case fan near the CPU with another fractal R2 fan, since I found them on sale and their CFM to Noise ratio was pretty damn good.  All hardware building aside, a majority of this project was actually focused on the software/functionality side of things. The first system, as was previously mentioned, was to be my HTPC computer and would have the Ceton InfiniTV 4 card along with a pair of 4TB drives for a ton of DVR space. Adding to that, I also decided to make a DVD ripping station out of it that would allow me to rip and archive all my DVDs for safe keeping, so I could seal the physical ones up in a box and throw them in the garage. In case anyone is interested, I used the following pieces of software to get that done: MakeMKV - for decryption Handbrake - for compression to H264/mkv Auto Rip n Compress - a great Windows Media Center plugin that will retrieve the DVD cover art, along with a description and details for each DVD you rip. It also allows 1-click automated ripping right from Windows Media Center. Super slick, and free!  The other system was to be a multiple emulator box, running everything from Colecovision and Atari 2600 up to Gamecube and PS2. I used a myriad of popular emulators, but found MAME, MESS, and UME to be the most powerful and flexible. A majority of my time was spent tweaking each individual emulator to work on a 1080p screen with four XBOX 360 wireless game controllers... no small task! I brought the whole package together with Maximus Arcade, which was an excellent and easy to use frontend that looked really clean. This system was delivered this past weekend to my friend, but not before making a copy of all said work for for myself!  And with that, Project Gemini is officially done! Now back to the real work/fun, over on Project Prism!  |