Idiot Proof HDD set up?

[grimlok]

Hey guys,
What's crackin'?
You lot staying outta trouble?

I've been fairly busy doing the daily grind thing. Netbook s@#t itself a while back, haven't replaced it as yet, administering the interwebs via (not so) smart fone and refusing to be one of those cats that use a bloody phone for everything. Plenty of other PCs in the house, just... running headless nix or xbmc without browsers etc. And let's be honest.... I'm LAZY. It would mean moving boxes around in closets etc just to put pcs by monitors and find batteries for my keyboard, and let's not forget that serious case of the CBF's I have.

Building 2 xboxes.
Prolly 500gig drives.
tweak pots on a couple of rom drives from the pile. Done and dusted.

These boxes aren't going to be connected to the net, or even to a local network for quite some time (I expect I'll get there eventually, but gotta walk before we can run with this one, 2 years ago "Reboot it" might as well have been in german)

Also these boxes won't really be used for anything other than gaming.
Soooo
Dash alternatives to XBMC? The More bullet proof the better.
I've always been kinda partial to evoX. But everyone's thoughts, pros/cons on avalaunch etc are always welcome.

Especially on boxes I won't get much of a chance to "maintain", but I will be the poor SOB called when/if they break it.

Also, kinda just wanted to stop in and say hi, Have a scope over the boards, and smoke a fatty in reception.

[xman]

Good to hear from you Grim. I found Avalaunch buggy playing games but it's IGR worked better than EvoXdash's. These were the 2 apps I used to used for games only machines. Avalaunch would lock the machine up for no apparent reason and EvoXDash's in game reset was dodgy at best. So there you go, the 2 I have used , both had issues. No meaning to preach XBMC but that is what both my sons have on there Games/Movie machines and those machines are more reliable and bug free than there 360s. One machine is running a September 2011 build and the other is running a January 2010 build. Both of these builds irrespective of there age are younger than the other app builds and as far as I can remember, much more reliable.

[whufclee]

Are you planning on just Xbox gaming or emulators? You can add xbox games to Coinops and have yoru xbox boot directly into that, that would be my personal preference. Oh by the way I'm just going to PM you so check your messages.

[grimlok]

HEYA GUYS!!!!

Xman:
Valid points. I'm not oooooverly concerned about things like IGR, More the solid stableness and WAF factor.
Previous Game boxes I've used EvoX with customised menus, and then gotten pissed off at the missing menu options I've taken out to idiot proof it when I need to work on it.
Your right when you say xbmc is youngest, and most stable all round as a dash, 1 of these boxes with xbmc as a dash will prolly do the job, and leave me a little room to showoff the networking features once I get that far.

Lee:
Coin-ops as a dash does actually sound like a really good idea for 1 of these boxes.
Couple of questions on that...
Is there a thread here with everything I need set up wise (I'll looky in a second anyway)
You say it will boot xbox games, does this mean if need be it will also boot the xbmc.xbe and launch xbmc?

[whufclee]

Yes, you should be able to boot into xbmc too. All you need to do is use the shortcut maker that comes with Coinops to point to your .xbe file for each game. Coinops is crazy big in size now, there are thousands of games included all with the relevant gameplay videos so if you want it let me know and maybe I can send it to you somehow.