Part 2 — The Refinement: Building a Cheap HTPC & Gaming Box
Posted by: Yameen on April 3rd, 2010
In Part 1 of my “Building a Cheap, Energy-Efficient HTPC & Classic Gaming Emulator Box” adventure, I outlined the different hardware options I was considering to create the cheapest, nicest-lookingest, lowest-energy-using, HD movie-playing, classic videogame-emulating home theater PC.
Four months later, I am more than happy with my purchase of the Acer Revo 1600.
And so, I am here to outline the refinements to the machine I have made since that first blog including interface devices, hardware upgrades and more.
Wireless Keyboard & Mouse
When I last left you at the end of Part 1, I was considering purchasing the $119 Logitech diNovo Mini (pictured above) to control the HTPC from the couch. It sure looks purtee in those pictures, don’t it? Well, reviews for the diNovo Mini were all over the map: Some people loved it, while others cited glaring problems with it including its trackpad, the build quality of its plastic shell, and of course its pricetag. For that price, I thought to myself, the thing needed to be damn-near perfect…So I held off. And good thing I did. Because within a few weeks two new devices came out that caught my eye.
The first was this guy:
I mean, it looked cool enough, right? Certainly functional with that huge trackpad and all those keys. There were a few Chinese knockoffs available on eBay, so prices ranged from about $30-$60.
A big downside for me was there were next to zero reviews for it at the time. And since its manufacturer’s name is glaringly omitted, no one could guarantee the quality of the build. Also, no F1, F2, etc keys which could prove problematic down the road.
My search continued, until I saw this baby…
Oh shit. It was everything I wanted: It had a trackball, it was small, I could use it in one hand, it had left and right mouse buttons and the price was decent enough (about $60 direct from Lenovo). No F1, F2 keys but whatever…It had dedicated home theater controls at the top for fast-forwarding, pausing, etc which more than made up for the lack of F-keys, in my opinion.
Boom. I copped it. And I absolutely love it.
It comes with a tiny USB dongle that I have inserted into the Revo’s rear port, out of sight. The Lenovo unit itself takes 2 AAA batteries. I picked up a pack of rechargeable AAA Eneloop’s for about $10 since I already have the charger. But as of this writing I am still using the batteries that came included with the wireless keyboard. It’s well-made and works lovely. I highly recommend this chumpy if you’re looking for an input device.
If the Lenovo isn’t really your cup of tea, I also considered these:
Mini Bluetooth Keyboard (no trackball or mouse function)
USB 2.4Ghz RF Wireless Tiny Keyboard With Trackball
Rii Mini Wireless Keyboard
USB Wireless Handheld Keyboard and Touchpad
Videogame Controller
The next thing I wanted to do was get a proper wireless game controller for the videogame emulators. I considered getting a wireless Xbox 360 controller for the PC, but there was a lot of overhead involved such as picking up the PC-compliant, proprietary wireless dongle that Microsoft sells (about $40 for a wireless controller, and another $30 for the wireless receiver). The wireless receiver is also somewhat big — about the size of a PC mouse — and would stick out like a sore thumb on a tiny HTPC).
Instead, I turned to my PS3 Bluetooth controller and found freeware PC drivers called MotionJoy which would enable me to use the DualShock 3 controller with Windows XP. All I needed was a Bluetooth dongle which I found for $14.99 on Amazon:
(Cirago Bluetooth BTA3210 v2.1 EDR Class 2 Micro Bluetooth Adapter)
It’s tiny. Super tiny. About the size of a dime as you can see in the picture above. (FYI: the USB wireless dongle that comes with the Lenovo Wireless Keyboard is exactly the same size.)
I inserted the Bluetooth dongle in one of the 4 rear USB ports on the Revo. Be warned: this particular dongle has a blue LED that flashes as it intercepts a signal. You can apply some electrical tape to the LED to hide the emitting light if you want, or simply do what I did and use a port on your HTPC that is in the rear of the unit and unseen. I never see any blinking light from the dongle, even in a completely dark room.
Once the Bluetooth dongle was installed, I configured the Dual Shock PC drivers and now I have complete and full use of the PS3 controller on my PC. That includes rumble, digital and all analogue controls. Additionally, I can now pair any Bluetooth device to the PC which is a nice added bonus.
RAM
The final thing I did was upgrade the RAM from 1 gig to 2 gigs…I’m not sure if this was really necessary: All of my HD videos and video game emulators worked just fine on the standard 1 gig of RAM. But I knew I wanted to install Windows 7 on a separate partition (more on that in Part 3), and figured I would just go ahead and get the RAM since it was fairly inexpensive (about $30 in December 2009).
The thing about RAM and the Acer Revo was…I was not entirely sure which kind to get. The documentation available online is not very good regarding this seemingly important tidbit. And so if you’re wondering, it has to be laptop RAM. Here is what I purchased:
Corsair Memory VS1GSDS800D2 1 GB PC2-6400 800Mhz 200-pin DDR2 Laptop Memory Kit
Just remember: If you upgrade your RAM to 2gigs, you need to enter into your Revo’s BIOS and upgrade its video memory from 256M to 516M to reap the benefits it will provide to the GPU (arguably the most important part of the Acer Revo).
You can find easy instructions to do that here. And below is a video on how to open your Revo hardware safely (although take note: it will void your warranty!):
Game Over, Man!
And voila! We have a refined, fully-operational, cheap HTPC & gaming box. Now stop dicking around with the thing and start playing some games and watching some movies! All from the comfort of your couch 
Continue reading:
Part 3 — Windows 7: Play 1080p HD MKV Movies on Your ION Acer Revo
Part 1 — Building a Cheap, Energy-Efficient HTPC & Classic Gaming Emulator Box
April 3rd, 2010 at 2:50 pm
[...] » Continue on to Part 2 of this series: The Refinement [...]
April 3rd, 2010 at 6:07 pm
Exactly. PS3 controllers own you.
April 3rd, 2010 at 9:46 pm
everything about it seems dope EXCEPT the ps3 controller. god those things suck.
April 18th, 2010 at 5:21 pm
Good read. Really can’t wait to get my hands on this, just waiting to offload my Xtreamer.
klome. No they don’t.
May 12th, 2010 at 1:07 pm
Hurry up with that Win7 install …
May 12th, 2010 at 1:24 pm
Ha. i actually finished over the weekend. I have to compile my notes and get the article goin
May 16th, 2010 at 4:38 pm
Wow! I’ve been researching this for over a year now trying to do pretty much exactly what you did (minus the video rips). I ultimately want to create a “Retrobox” that I can set up next to my other consoles and run all of the older systems off of. My one question to you is have you tried using an N64 emulator on your machine? Better yet, have you tried it in Win 7? It’s kind of a deal breaker for me if it doesn’t work smoothly. This is pretty much the last little bit of intel that I need in order to convince me to finally do this.
Please let me know when you have a second as I’d really love to start building my Retrobox!
thanks so much, and fantastic article!
May 16th, 2010 at 6:24 pm
Hey, Josh. So I just installed the Project64 emulator on my Windows7 partition. I’m not sure if that’s the best emulator out there, but it was rated the highest at The Emulator Zone: http://www.emulator-zone.com/doc.php/n64/project64.html
And great news: As far as I can tell, the games run perfectly. Even in fullscreen. Even though I own the games I tested, I’m a little reticent to post their names. Hope you understand. But I tried some of the most popular titles, as well as ones I thought would put some strain on the Revo’s processors.
I checked the frames-per-second counter and it always stayed just around 60fps. When you look at Project64′s suggested specs, the Revo more than stands up to the task:
Pentium III
600 Mhz or better
128 Mb. RAM or more
Fast video card with 16 Mb. Video RAM or more
Windows 95/98/Me
DirectX 6.0 (latest version of DirectX recommended)
Those are some old specs. So yea. As far as I can tell, man, N64 is no problem on the Revo. And the games look SICK in HD, btw.
Thanks for writing in about that. I’ll add it to my forthcoming Windows 7 article. Holler!
May 27th, 2010 at 9:19 am
@Josh,
you beat me too it! This too was also the FINAL question i needed answering before making my purchase. (then again if the answer was that it didn’t run well (N64) I would probably end up getting it anyway for all the other media rich abilities!)
@Yameen,
Thank you SO much for providing this information! I will be making my purchase (Revo 3610) in the next couple of days!
Also Yameen, could I ask you a question about how you get the media to your revo? I know you said through an ethernet cable but what is on the other end? Do you have another pc that you leave on somewhere else in the house? just curious as I was going to go about it through a large external hardrive, and would be good to know of other ways.
Thanks again! and can’t wait to read your windows 7 article!
Mark
May 27th, 2010 at 11:17 am
Hi, Mark.
Once your Revo is on your network, you can create a shared folder on your Revo. I keep one on my Revo’s desktop so I can easily trasnfer files around between computers on the network. Any other computer on the same network will be able to see your Revo’s shared folder, and you can easily drop files into the folder.
Alternatively, you can invest in a NAS — Network Attached Storage — which can act as a file server for your home network. These are great, and I definitely recommend doing this. Here’s a good Cnet article:
http://reviews.cnet.com/best-network-attached-storage/
Thanks!
June 4th, 2010 at 6:50 pm
Hello Yameen,
So I installed Project 64 and am having hit or miss performances with certain titles. Some play flawlessly while others run uncomfortably slow. I have read when it comes to emulators the CPU is what makes or breaks performance. My CPU usage never spikes above 80% and levels off on roughly 60%.I was wondering if you have any recommendations on how to resolve this issue? Keep in mind I also have a Win 7, 2gb video with video increased to 512Mb.
P.S. If anyone is wondering, I installed Boxee instead of XBMC and it too runs smoothly.
June 5th, 2010 at 1:10 am
Hmmm…Do you have Aero disabled or enabled?
My instinct was to disable Aero and free up some vram, right? Well, I have noticed in many cases (including Hulu Desktop and Media Player Home Cinema) leaving Aero ENABLED provides better performance in regards to vsync and refresh rates.
Also, it could be your roms are bad? Seems unlikely, however.
Are you running the N64 roms in fullscreen? Have you tried adjusting some of Project64′s settings to tweak performance?
Also, make sure Windows Automatic Updates isn’t doing any kind of shit in the background. When I first installed Windows 7 and tried watching movies, I couldn’t figure out why the video was so choppy. Then I realized Windows was constantly downloading updates and applying them in the background. I ended up setting Automatic Updates to Manual, rather than the default Automatic setting.
June 14th, 2010 at 3:32 am
Hello Yameen!
I was wondering if you test out a couple of games for me? The demo’s are available on steam so they shouldn’t be too difficult to get. They are “Trine” and “Serious Sam HD (the first encounter)”
If the revo can play these well then an acer revo will be in my house the very next day.
June 24th, 2010 at 7:20 am
Thanks for these excellent articles! I’m seriously considering an Acer Revo for the living room to pump Hulu, music, & video files to my big screen.
One question – how does the Acer handle general web browsing from the couch, things like ebay, twitter, facebook, blogging, forums, google maps, etc.? I’d like to be able to do some web stuff in the living room and wondered how zippy the Revo is.
Thanks!
June 24th, 2010 at 1:44 pm
Hey, Jad.
As far as general web browsing on a TV goes on the Acer Revo, I DEFINITELY suggest Windows 7. It has a mode (sorry, the name escapes me) that essentially “beefs up” all of the icons and fonts on the operating system, making them all large and highly viewable from afar when viewing on your couch, say. It’s great. Same thing with web browsers: Adjust the fonts to display large and it’s all highly viewable.
Now keep in mind I have the single core Revo, the 1600. And as far as casual web browsing goes, I don’t have a complaint. Again, Windows 7 I feel is the better choice over XP. It’s all very zippy. That’s not to say XP isn’t bad either, but if you have a choice, I would go with Windows 7. And of course in either operating system, I would suggest going with Chrome as your web browser of choice: It’s super lean in memory size, and a very fast browser. I still use Firefox, but I can feel the difference right away.
With Flash 10.1 your results will vary. But non-Flash sites all work great. I suspect if you go dual core with the Acer Revo 3610, you will get even better results with casual web browsing.
One last word regarding Hulu: in WindowsXP? Forget about it. XP doesn’t have anything to compensate for vsync, so Hulu’s quite a tearing mess in action scenes and panning shots. Of course, being a modern operating system, Windows 7 fares much better when Aero is turned on, eliminating pretty much all Hulu screen tearing although the picture is still prone to a skip here and there as the Flash plugin (the weak link in the puzzle) struggles to cope.
July 10th, 2010 at 12:43 am
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