here's the full skinny on these boards, as i am now the owner of one of them
i can tell you now, working with it is NOT EASY... at all!
the documentation is sparse, and the jumpers are mis-set so a lot of messing around is required to even get anything started., even the bios needs some tweaking to make sure your monitor doesnt go into standby during boot up so you can even see the BIOS settings after hammering del/f2..
power is handled via JAMMA, I have mine running on my desktop via a SCART supergun adapter, and audio is also carried out of jamma.
the bad news is that video is not wired AT ALL through JAMMA so, if you want this as a mame cab solution, you'll have to wire an ultimarc VGA to jamma adapter from the VGA port and solder the wires to the jamma connector on the other side of the board, wiring it directly w/o an adapter will give you a dark image, as the voltage from the VGA isn't enough for your cab to get a bright picture.
on top of that windows XPe is HELL to work with, you have to pretty much design your own custom windows OS from scratch , knowing EXACTLY what resource, DLL set, applications etc will be needed to run every component on the board,everything you attach and also support any app you decide to run, as most apps require a whole heap of windows DLL's and runtimes.. they're very rarely just a .exe file!!
isntalling drivers etc, isnt an option, you have to componentise EVERY SINGLE ELEMENT you want in your XPE build via a component building application if one hasnt already been done, that includes video, audio, directX etc..
say you want to put powerstrip on it.. you'll have to run powerstrip in an app that will examine the EXE and what DLL's it calls to run and gather each one into your build manager and add this to your XPe build...
want a USB joystick or even a keyboard to run via XPe? you'd better find the drivers from a list of 20,000 individual components in the XPe target designer..
I've had it over a month and have only just got a windows XPe build up and running on the machine via compactflash - when I say build - I mean an empty version of windows with a mouse pointer, and keyboard support.. no filebrowser, options, settings, anything.. just a blank desktop.
- you also need special CompactFlash cards set as FIXED DRIVES to get it to even boot - a standard CF wont work (not in a practical sense at least) , and even then you have to implement a special non writing filter app called EWF (enhaced write flter) to prevent windows from constantly writing and defragging the CF as they can only withstand so many thousand writes without dying.. it's a lot of writes, but without EWF , eventually the CF will die.
If I had someone that could help me with XPE, i'd make a lot more progress, but I really don't know anyone with that kind of specialised knowledge.. it's going to take a LONG time before I can even get anything working to even try some directx load tests to see if the GMA900 graphics card can handle my project..
hell, I dont even know if DX9 and the video drivers are even working right yet..
I don't recommend this board to anyone who doesnt know wndows inside out to try and get something working in the way it was intended.
so, if anyone on here knows anyone that knows XPe, and can offer me some support, please let me know..
