Kustom Kid

When I'm done fixing the house up I will. We've lived here 3 years and figured it was time to "make it ours." I have a few things in the kitchen left to do, the master bedroom, and the spare bedroom. My son's room, living room, utility room, and yard were pretty easy to do, so I should be done with everything by the end of summer. I've actually already built the computer for the cabinet, so it's just a matter of designing and building a cab to put it in. I'm already planning on a Tank Stick, rigging up 2 SNES controllers, and 2 wireless Xbox 360 controllers. There are a lot of amazing cabinets here which gets the creative mind going.

I avoid this thread like the plague because every time I see all of these amazing cabinets I want to build one. Keep up the good work everyone!

Or "shall we play a game" War Games style.

Currently I have Digital Preferred + internet for $10/mo more than I was paying for basic cable + internet. If you have your own equipment you won't have to pay all of the extra fees. I'm not even paying the "HD tech" fee which might be a mistake on Comcasts part, but hey, I'm not going to argue. If I were to use Comcasts equipment I would be paying an additional $42/mo. for 3 TVs (currently 1 HTPC and 2 Xbox 360 extenders). For me, at least, all I did was call Comcast and ask what packages were available. I told them I had my own equipment (tell them Tivo if they ask to avoid confusion) and reserved a pickup for the CableCard the next day at my local office. Total time spent between talking to Comcast, driving to Microcenter for the HDHR Prime, driving to Comcast to pick up my card, and setting up my PC was about 2 hours. If you have any questions your friends cannot answer a friend of mine works for TWC in North Carolina. He was an installer for several years, but just got a promotion and now he's a desk jockey. I do know that you'll almost positively need a tuning adapter. The first one is free, so you'll be good to go as far as that goes. It does lag a bit using the Ceton PCIe card, but it's not as noticable with the Silicondust HD Homerun Prime. We've had AT&T, DirecTV, Dish Network, and Comcast with their equipment. Our current setup right now blows all of them out of the water. 1TB of storage for DVR, 1.5TB of storage for movie rips, music, pictures. It's available on all televisions in the house, my wife's iPhone, my Android phone, the Android tablet, and any computer with an internet connection anywhere. Good luck!

Same here, but I'm using a HD Homerun Prime and WMC.

Unless you have satellite, AT&T, our some weird cable company that has managed to circumvent the law they have to offer cablecards.There was a law passed, in 2007 I believe, that states all cable boxes have to be cablecard based. They must also offer cablecards in order to open the market to 3rd party vendors and loosen the monopoly cable companies have on cable boxes.

So, I know a few of us on here use Windows Media Center and I wanted to bring to your attention beta tests for Ceton apps for WMC, iOS, Android, etc. which start at the end of the month. In addition you can sign up for the Ceton Q extender beta which starts in July. I'm pretty excited and signed up for both. Here is the link to sign up http://cetoncorp.com/blog/ceton-companion-apps-extender-beta-announcement/

I'm not sure of any MAME emulators, but I found two good emulators that I use fairly often. NES.emu and SNES9X EX. I'm pretty sure there are a ton of other emulators out there as well. It's all a matter of finding them. You might have to sideload them as they might not be available in the Play Store.

The original Call of Duty was great. Medal of Honor, CoD, and Battlefield 1942 all hit around the same time and were good games. Then they turned them into Madden FPS editions and cranked new ones out each year and ruined them. And for overrated games the Zeldas on the N64 are overrated in my book. Great games yes, but not the end all be all. Also on my list is Grand Theft Auto series. Final Fantasy VII is overrated, too. Hell all FFs after VI are overrated with the exception of IX. Call me a stodgy old man, but VI, IV, and IX were my favorites by far. I have purchased every single Final Fantasy game in the original series with the exception of XIV. Square Enix is not unlike George Lucas in that they could crap in a box, slap the appropriate logo on there, and there's a 99.4% chance that I'll buy it.

Ah man, I missed out happy belated birthday, Circo.

I'm having flashbacks of "Virtual Reality" games at Cedar Point in the '90's that only ended up giving me a headache and an upset stomach.

There's a selection to disable opening animation (can't remember the exact verbiage) in the setup.

Happy Birthday, Alpha.

Just in time for my new build! Yay! Thanks for all the hard work.

So we got a decent return back this year. After paying off our bills, stashing some cash away, allotting money for a kitchen update and new living room furniture, we still had some fun money left over. I bought an Elocity A7 tablet for my wife and a Silicondust HDHomerun Prime for all of us. The tablet was $130 for a refurb unit at Microcenter. Let me tell you, once you flash the ElocityMod rom on it it's amazing. It runs like $400 tablet. Amazing. If you're looking for an inexpensive tablet and you're comfortable with tinkering with stuff like flashing the rom it's an incredible deal. The touch screen in resistive and not capacitive, so its not a true multitouch, but somehow it's able to register multitouch gestures like pinching to zoom. It blows the Kindle Fire out of the water and Flash video is smoother than on the Samsung Galaxy Tab. The homerun prime is just because we've had local channels only on the Media Center for the last two years and it's time to splurge a little bit (that and it's only $15 more a month for 150+ channels). Ok I just had to tell someone that would appreciate the electronic goodness, because most of my RL friends wouldn't understand the awesomeness.

All my Kinect does is make my TV look like a weird version of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit. I had hoped it would make navigating around the Xbox, which we use for a WMC extender, easier, but we found that it's a lot easier to use a controller/remote.

I'm a big ATI/AMD guy, but the MSI 560 Ti Frozr OC is a solid card for about $250.

Thanks for the replies. I ended up going with Macrium Reflect Free. From install to image to creating a restore CD it took about 35 minutes. Hopefully it will save me some time the next time my setup decides to take a dump. I will check out all of your suggestions and see if I like them better, but I wanted to get it imaged before it got loaded up with garbage.

Explanation of why I'm asking: So I just spent that last 5 hours doing a clean install on my media center PC. With all of the Microsoft updates, software, guide/channel setup, add-ins, etc., it took a lot longer than I had figured to get it exactly where it was before I upgraded some parts. Having to do it while the family was sleeping greatly cut into my sleep time. Actual question: What do you use or recommend for disk imaging. I've been putting off doing it for some time, but after what I just went through I feel it's time. Are the free options like Macrium, Clonezilla, or even the one built into Windows 7, good, or are there paid options out there I should be looking into? Thanks in advance.

That's going to be really nice, Draco. I'm just going to make a mini-itx box that's easily portable so I can take it to friends houses and we can game there. I was going to stuff it in a NES or SNES shell, but I found a nice case for $40 that will be sufficient.

If you took the rubber off most of them were .68 caliber. Perfect fit for a paintball gun. Or so I've heard. I don't miss cleaning the rollers and sensor on old mice.

Media Browser has been running great the last few days. I checked the RAM usage this morning and it was floating around 4GB, so the amount I had previously was most likely the problem. Back on topic, since GameEx will have DLNA streaming soon I'm going to use it as a HTPC/Emulator FE with my upcoming build project.

I'm a few days late, but happy birthday! I hope it was a good one. Work and all.

Not really. At the time I had an AMD 560 BE with all 4 cores unlocked running at 3.8 GHz, a SSD hard drive. 4 GB of RAM which may have been the problem. I just bumped up to 12 GB of RAM and dropped the processor back to stock specs (dual core, 3.2GHz), so maybe I'll give it another whirl. I am running 2 Xbox extenders off of it and Serviio for a streaming box in another bedroom so the overkill on RAM was to help lower some of the buffer times.

Am I the only person that uses WMC that doesn't like Media Browser? It made my system run like crap.