Originally I wanted to use an old P90 as the player platform, but when I noticed how big the mainboard is, how slooow mp3-encoding is and how slow it is when it comes to disk access I was in need of another board that can use old DRAM (64megs from the P90), has ATX features and can hold fast processors. I found the perfect one with the TXP4 from Asus which was hard to find but I finally succeeded and got one. As it has a socket 7 and as the last socket 7 processor from Intel had only 233Mhz I decided to put in a AMD K6-2 500 which now runs at 400Mhz because the board cannot run it at 500 - but it's not that critical anyway because it produces less heat this way. The core voltage has been set to 2.0V because it is the lowest voltage the TXP4 can deliver and the K6-2 runs as stable as with 2.2V.

Now that the core was complete I was looking for the right soundcard. As I was planning to use MPXPlay as the player soft I had to use a card that is 100% SB16-compatible under plain DOS, so I went for the SB64 value. I now regret this because winamp is used now and I can use any windows-compatible soundcard. Since I have an AV-receiver with multiple S/PDIF inputs (one of them is used by the PC) and never ever want to miss the clear and undistorted sound of the DAC of my receiver which is no comparison to the integrated DAC on a soundcard, a S/PDIF output would be perfect for yume. So I now sold the SB64 value and bought a SB64 gold which has a coaxial S/PDIF output and still fits into the case - every PCI-soundcard would be too high, so I had to take a ISA card in order to mount it on the raiser card.
To be prepared for everything I added an optical S/PDIF output as well by using a Toshiba TX178A and a small driver circuit:


To keep win32 happy I have to put in a graphics card as well - as speed is not critical I can choose between using an ISA or a PCI card - which one I will make it depends on the space that is left in the case when everything is complete.

As mass storage device I decided to use one of the new IBM drives, the DTLA-305020. This has several reasons: