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Video: The Empeg Car (Patreon)

Published:
2025-06-30 16:28:43
Imported:
2026-06

Content

I've been sitting on these things for two years trying to find a spicy way to cover them but since I don't own a car with a normal radio mount it was never gonna happen, so here you go.Dunno if I'm gonna keep the moustache; it looks better in person than it does on camera for some reason.

Files

Empeg Car RC2

Support me on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/cathoderaydude Tip me: https://ko-fi.com/cathoderaydude

Comments

Nathan Schmidt

Oh wow I had one of these. It was ... not great but also felt like living ten years into the future.

sen

Yessss I am so excited about this video :D I still remember reading about the original empeg in Linux Journal way back in 1999, and it’s stuck in my head ever since.

Shaun Brandt

While I never ended up getting one, I gave some serious thought to picking one of these up back in the day to put into my then-new 2000 Honda Civic. It was just too expensive to justify though. I didn't end up getting a MP3-capable head unit in that car until ~2004, when prices had gone down and more options were available.

Pierre

Digging the stash

Paul Spencer

Keep the stash for the summer, or a bit longer. It feels like a “that one summer stash”. It’s here for a good time not a long time.

Pup Gray

Partner looking at my phone’s notifications: “… mpreg car???”

doink

When I grew my mustache, I was a little unsure of myself as well. I stuck with it for a few months and it really came in. Now I can't imagine what I'd look like without it. It takes tons of patience and confidence to let it fully grow. Embrace it!

Crash Cash

Wait! That's an Intel made *ARM* CPU! I've been telling people Intel made ARM licensed stuff 25 years ago! Here's my proof! All my co-workers are "oh Intel wouldn't touch ARM with a 20ft pole"

seagull

is this coming to youtube?

cathoderaydude

Not sure what you mean? It's a normal channel video, I'm gonna release it publicly

Redqueenrunning

John Waters mustache, Miata referenced. It really is Pride month. 🌈

seagull

yes, in the fullness of time it became obvious. at the time it still had the title "Empeg Car RC2" and i couldn't tell whether "here you go" meant "i am going to release this to everyone as-is" or "i remain unhappy with this so here you go as a patreon exclusive".

Dante Blando

Look up Corel Netwinder if you'd like your mind blown. I own two of them. They had a Intel StrongARM (v4l) running at 200 MHz. Not only didn't it need a heatsink, but they mounted the notebook drive directly over it.

Dante Blando

Yay, and stash! Quick note, at 01:38 you put your hands over the head units then say "the car feels like an object out of time". I suspect you meant these particular car stereos, not actual cars.

Torbjörn Lindgren

It's not exactly obscure!, Intel StrongARM and follow on XScale ARM processors saw a TON of use, they were some of the most performant ARM implementations for their time and for Intel it replaced their aging i960 processors for certain types of "embedded" work which their x86 processor at the time was unsuitable for. Digital (yes, that DEC!) originally developed the StrongARM core/SOC, they started selling in 1996 but in 1997 the rights got transferred to Intel as part of a settlement on a patent infringment lawsuit. Then in 2006 Intel sold it's ARM business to Marvell which kept the name for a while selling ARM processors using both DEC/Intel derived cores and ARM designed cortex cores. Marvell still builds and sells ARM processors for servers and embedded to this day but unlikely there's anything tracing back to the DEC cores. There was LOTS of press about it even in mainstream computer publications when Intel sold it to Marvell because as mentioned it WAS one of the better performing ARM cores at the time. All this is extensively documented pretty much everywhere, for Wikipedia it's on the main ARM architecture in addition to the pages for the two individual microarchitectures.

ChiraFox

I miss the age when these problems weren't yet ""solved"" and people were making weird stuff like this with unpolished design but plenty of aspirations. Thanks for making this, I had no idea about it! Fun video!

D. Roscoe

Congrats on the 200k subs. It looks like this might have been the video that did it.

DTV

This made me want a full video just on the late 90s car computers you mentioned

LegitBinary

Everything is better with VFDs.

qdoggie

This thing kicks ass, thanks for the video! Amazed at how many weird settings it has made me go "Oh, yeah, like in rockbox!" This predates rockbox by a few years, crazy. Shoutouts to the music keg

Jonathan V

Same, though I went through that a quarter century ago, I wouldn't change mine now that it's me. If someone ever told me it was them or the facial hair, well, there's the door. If I ever jack into the Matrix, it'll be part of my residual self-image. After the first second of "Oh hey, he looks different" I almost immediately mentally moved on as I got sucked into the content and I didn't even think about the new look again until I glanced at the Youtube comments ...

Jonathan V

I was so hyped when I saw this in my notifications. I remember when these were just beginning to be talked about, wanted one so bad, but too expensive for me.

IrisRealtime

Endless menus were what made me hate RockBox. I don't need a billion ways to dick around with settings and thingamajigs - I just want to turn on the thing, find a song and play.

Soren

Oh my god I love the VFD. I wish more products today had graphical VFDs, they're just so whimsical. Also,,, 100 Gecs, Jeff Rosenstock, Jeremy Blake... are you me?

Christopher Davies

It'd be interesting to have set this up as a side by side with its contemporary, the PJB-1000 portable MP3 player. Basically the same Intel Assabet guts, same hard drive, just a different DSP and a USB rather than an ethernet chip.

Evan

Oh man I lusted after this thing so hard back in the day.

t

Really enjoying the groovebox (+ musicstore) series. Something in the presentation/content/delivery/editing really ties them all together in my mind. All engaging but relaxing. re: moustache, I like it. I have noticed with my own facial hair, it wasn't necessarily being on camera that changed my opinion about it but 2 other factors. I am very tall, when someone takes a photo of me, I see myself from their viewpoint and that's usually quite different than mine. You're also tall so something similar might be happening there too. But even more so, the lighting. certain color temps, CRI, total illumination, directionality all bring out different aspects and either focus on the hair or the rest of the face. I don't know how much time you spend on color grading/science stuff but small tweaks could bring it back in line with your own mental image. edit: Wendy filters are a unique feature in my mind as well. It's also a negative filter which feels like programmer UI and might be slightly too much for "average consumer" but it also feels like something that could have caught on. They're also cool in the shift from everyone in the family sharing a computer to everyone in the family has multiple computing devices timeline. I have noticed over the years that my partner(s) either really like or really really dislike parts of my music library. <3 John de Lancie <3

dante

This is a really good vid, dude. One of my favorites of yours for sure

Asaf Sagi

I can't find pictures of it right now, but back in the day, circa 2004 when I got my driver's license, my friend and I, we took an old cassette car stereo and """hacked""" it into receiving signal from a rudimentary USB-based MP3 player. One that was made of two parts - the player itself, and a flash drive which plugged into it. My idea was to make the player part built into my car, and take out the flash drive for music refreshes from time to time. We test-benched it at my house using an old computer power supply, which when shorted, was able to supply 12V to the car stereo which was sitting beside it. It was fun times, for sure.

IrisRealtime

I didn't even know Intel made ARM processors. Thought they only got the tooling for making them last year..

DJ Illuminator

So, I *WANTED* one of these when I first read about it. O'Reilly put out a book in 2000 called "MP3: The Definitive Guide", which had a BUNCH of info about the MP3 ecology circa 1999, which covered stuff like this box, and an absolute CRAPTON of info covering how BeOS could have extensions to it such that you could have it read ID3 tags as OS-level metadata in the file explorer, and that BeOS was a really really great choice for you to use if you were playing around with MP3s. And everything I read about the empeg in the book just told me how much I NEEDED it. In retrospect, as CRD notes in the video, I'd be trying to change some setting or pull up a specific song and go flying off an overpass while I was distracted. But damn, did I want one of these.

Steve Garwood

Dang, this is the coolest early model ‘smart’ car deck I’ve ever seen. TBH I’d still love to get my hands on one, replace a couple of SSD’s for stability and also go in to the Linux Interface and bring up the browse ability without the remote being needed. I’d also clean up the blank EQ settings with some defaults. I’m gonna try and find one that works; if anyone has one they want to part with, let me know.