Help choosing hardware

From: yannouch (yann_at_yannouch.net)
Date: 11/23/04 

Date: 23 Nov 2004 11:42:47 -0800

Hi all,

My goal is to make a home cd player like, which would permit to :

Read CDs,
record them in FLAC format on a HDD
read FLAC files from HDD

I want it to have a graphical LCD (240x64 pixels seems cool) and some
buttons (around 10) to control it.

I want it to run Linux.

I'm now looking for the main board.
It needs :

- a powerfull enougth CPU (not hundreds of thousands of horse power
needed, smthg like a PII400 or ARM9 200Mhz would be enought I guess)
- some ram
- an IDE controller for 2 devices (HDD & CDROM)
- something to control LCD & buttons.

The most important feature is : it must boot and be operationnal
*VERY* fast.
The second most important feature is : it must be cheap (less than
200$)

I've looked around, and found a lot of ARM9 boards but none of them (a
very few in fact, but these are expensive) have IDE controler.

The x86 board have all features, but x86 bioses are known to boot very
slowly ... or I haven't found the good informations about them.

So my question is : do you know such a board ? (if it doesn't have
video nor PCI nor ... I don't care, I just need CPU & RAM & ide
connector & serial port for development & XXXX port [usb?] for
LCD/buttons, and actually I would prefer not to have uneeded features)

The next step is : if I could plug to it an external DAC module
(external to the mainboard, but inside the player), in order to be
able to add a seperate designed high fidelity audio converter ...
would be great (but I don't even know if it's feasible and where I
could plug it)

Thanks in advance for your help

Y.

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