Readers that come to my site may already know the mess that is my office. Refresh this site enough and in the header image will give you a tiny peek of the chaos. The picture does not do the true mess justice, because two machines are not in the frame, an IPCop Firewall box on a Pentium II and an XP machine running a 1.8Ghz Pentium 4. The latter has been my Windows whipping boy, abused for its disk space and exploited for its TV tuner… until now. Over the years and three TV tuners, due to power spikes and lighting strikes this last TV tuner has degraded.

Weeks ago, I bought a usb stick TV tuner, I’m not going to mention the vendor or supplier… this isn’t a viral marketing post. It arrived the other day and I attached it to the gracefully aging iMac (17-inch USB 2.0, Horizon, Q26C). It’s turning out to be a good system. I haven’t used any of recording/transcoding EyeTV features that came with the hardware, but I’m excited that they are there.

So, what’s in store for my fading XP box? Hook up M.A.M.E. and my two-player X-arcade