I wouldn't have thought a trackball was such a good thing for a car control
system. Too much attention required. You could add a few buttons hooked up
as a keyboard (then at most you'd have to write something to convert your
non-standard keypresses to standard ones which isn't that hard. Intercepting
key messages is about the limit of what you can easily do from another
process I believe). Then you could have a couple of buttons at appropriate
places on the steering wheel (like most new car radios) for things like
track advance and volume. That way you don't need to concentrate on the
trackball/screen. If you had audible signals as well you would barely need
the screen for standard operation. I just think if cops pulled you over and
you had a screen and trackball they might get a bit suss.

If your running 9x not NT then LPT interfacing shouldn't be too bad. It's NT
where you have real problems as it wants evrything on the LPT to be a
printer. However COM ports might be possible in NT or as suggested above a
custom keyboard interface.

My old boss was at one stage planning to gaffa tape an IR keyboard to his
steering wheel but was convinced by friends/family/complete strangers that
he would (or at least should) get arrested for such a thing so you want to
be careful about this when installing electronic devices in a car. For
instance it is against the law for car TVs to function while the vehicle is
running btu you can still have one installed. I would have to assume a
monitor would invoke similar laws.

I also would have thought a system based on a 486 with ISA video and sound
would have been cheaper than an AGP system and just as functional (although
$180 ain't bad). For a start that MB will only have Slots not sockets so
you'll need an adapter or a celeron or greater. Which IMHO is all a bit over
the top if all you want is MP3 playback.

Tom.
----- Original Message -----
From: Stuart O'Reilly <pig@AR.COM.AU>
Subject: (OT) Re: Thanks for the Information
> I've been thinking of a car computer as well, for playing MP3's, I thought
of
> making control panels that connect to the LPT port (using a pic) to
control what
> song and playlist etc but it looked to hard to do the windows software. So
to get
> around it I've decided to get an (ntsc) 4" LCD monitor from Timeline inc
for
> about $70 - $80 and connect this to the video out of an AGP video card and
to
> controll it I'll use a trackball therefore no custom written software, no
hassels
> etc
> Regards
> Stuart
> P.S. I've priced motherboards here in Aus and i can get a motherboard with
AGP
> video, sound,100 baseT network card and a 56K modem all built in (making
it very
> compact) for about $180