Following on from the suspected dead RAM in Zippy, it had been sat there, waiting to be tested in another machine. And, as today was a boring Sunday afternoon, I decided to kill two birds with one stone. Firstly, test the RAM using the PVR box, then actually get the PVR box working.

So, I removed the 512Mb stick in there, and replaced it with the two suspect ones from Zippy. Indeed, MemTest flagged up errors after a few minutes….

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So, the next step was, obviously, power of deduction. I removed one stick, and within a few minutes, Memtest did indeed pick up RAM errors.

So, the faulty stick was removed, and disposed of.

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The other test passed fine, so it was kept.

SO, then onto the PVR box itself. Could I get it working? Firstly, I decided that after all of the changes I’d made, it would be best to start from the beginning. Off went the partitions, and a shiny new set were created. Exactly why it takes Windoze almost an hour to partition and format a new drive, yet it takes Linux less than a minute, remains a mystery to me.

Either way, the software was installed. And after pissing around with the settings for a bit (sadly, I don;t know exactly what I did), it displayed an image! OK, so it was nothing but snow, but finally we had an image. It picked up on the tuner, but if anything, it was going to be used with composite input so I could use it with the digibox.

Unfortunately, the digibox was unavailable. Bugger. What else did I have to hand with a composite output? Yes, you guessed it. Up steps the trusty XBox Of Glory. Hurrah!

So I connected it, ran the set up program to change the active device to Composite-0, and…… nothing. Got lots of audio. But no picture. Sigh. It must be on one of the other 5 composite channels. I have no idea why there’s 5. There’s only one yellow socket on the back. There’s the S-Video socket, but that has its own channel.

Now, either due to a limitation of the software, or my lack of knowledge, each time I needed to change the composite channel, I also needed to reboot.

So imagine my amusement when I got to Composite-3, and still had nothing on screen. With one last selection to choose, I wasn’t holding out much hope. So, One change and one reboot later, it all came down to the last choice. Composite-4. I held my breath while I rebooted. Would it work? COULD it work?

The answer is yes. I let out an almighty roar of delight, as the Xbox logo flashed across the screen.

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So, at the minute it’s “working”. It accepted input from my XBox, and allowed me to pause it, as shown in the picture. I’ve yet to record anything properley using it.

My findings are…

- The Processor and chip might be too slow It looks as if it needs a *beast* of a machine. It’s a 1.2ghz Athlon running at 100Mhz FSB, with 512MB of memory. The memory seems to be enough, but the processor is certainly casing issues

- Hardware MPEG encoding/decoding is a definite advantage. My card only does one of these, and I can’t remember which :)

- Disk space = paramount. There’s a 120Gb drive in there currently, so that’s not too bad I suppose. But more will be better. Even better would be putting a DVD writer in there. I’ll look into it.

- DVD decoding/storing doesn’t work. And I’m going to leave it like that, for obvious reasons!

- It has MAME in it! Get MAME working

- Get TV Output working. The instructions given don’t work.

Updates on it, once again, when and where appropriate