Thanks everyone. I wish I could say I've made more progress. Holidays really sidetracked me and I've got a "honey-do" list a mile long.
Anyway, I am going headless... no head unit. I bought an HQCT-e radio tuner for a radio. I remember investigating keeping the factory head unit, and I don't think the Honda's is capable of having external input. You'd have to use an FM transmitter.
Doing the dual monitor thing has proved interesting. Initially, I thought I had my solution with my nVidia card that had both VGA and composite outputs. The problem is I couldn't get the composite video to fill the entire screen. I'd get black borders around the edges. Not a big deal when you've got a huge TV, but when it's only 7", you'd like as much of the screen filled as possible! Adjusting the overscan in the nVidia drivers (many different variations of them) didn't help at all. I found a program (now unsupported) called TVTool. It expanded the desktop to fill the entire screen, but when you played a video (the intended purpose of the composite screens) the screen would go haywire.
I wrote to the video card mfg (Jaton) and they had me exchange the card. The new card did the same thing.
Then I ordered an ATI card to try that. Same problem! The overscan settings worked a
little to make the image bigger, but still didn't fill the entire screen. I returned that card.
So, my last option, I ordered this
VGA to composite converter. It has a "size" button on it. When I press it, VOILA! The video now fills the entire screen.
The caveat to this solution is that I'm using the VGA out on my motherboard for the composite video and the VGA out on the nVidia PCI card for the primary display. Because they are separate video cards, I can't (that I know of) use the overlay settings to make the video automatically appear full screen on the secondary monitor when playing on the first monitor.
It's OK, though. I'd already written my own video player program in VB.NET for my home entertainment PC that is designed for this. It finds the secondary monitor and automatically puts the video output on that monitor. I'm just updating the interface to allow for point and click (it currently is only keyboard driven -- designed to work with my infrared remote control). I'll post the source when it's done.
That's where I'm at so far. Nothings in the van yet
but I think it'll come together really fast. Just need a kid/wife-free weekend
