I origonally posted this on a comment in the intel mac-mini take-apart guide article. I feel that it really doesnt belong there, but in its own thread... so i created a new topic.
Now, a bit of background. I have a PowerPC G$ 1.58GHz Mac-Mini (overclocked 1.42) and i have wanted to make native support for front row and the Apple remote control since those products were announced. In the take apart of the intel mini, you can see the IR board, and i asked if it showed up in system profiler as a USB device. someone had posted the system profiler report, i looked at it, and it did show up as a USB IR reciever... so, off I went... and this post was the follow up...
"OK... i asked a few posts ago about the profiler stuff on the IR interface... i did download the file and took a look at it.... now, as far as supporting it on our macs.... ive made a BIT of progress this evening... by route of Microsoft. Now, the XBOX is actually a computer, and the controller ports are actually USB ports... so, in that line of thought i was thinking about getting unofficial-offical support for front row on my mini, so i was trying to figure out how to hack some of my home IR hardware onto the USB bus, after about ten minutes of thinking, i looked over at the "DVD Playback Kit" plugged into my XBOX and got a silly idea. I removed the playback kit (really, just a USB IR interface with an awkward plug) jammed some strands of cat 5 into it to connect to the pins (if it works, ill take it apart and build it more safely) and then tied them into a cut apart usb cable. it shows up in system profiler (it doesnt know what it is, it says "USB Device" then gives the rev #, the device id# and product id #) now all i need to do is to figure out how to spoof the system to cross reference the device/product ID's of my MS reciever against the ID's shown in the mini's profiler report. It is my theory that when i can cross reference them, that the Apple IR remote will work!! (fingers crossed)
NOTE: anyone with a Philips Pronto and a new Apple IR remote can help me out alot. i havent bought tthe remote from apple yet, but if this works, i most definetly will. So, any pronto users out there, if you could make sure your apple remote is set for Computer instead of iPod and then captue the codes from it and send me the .CCF i will be able to test. remotecentral.com has a few files posted, but im pretty sure that it is the iPod codeset, not the Computer codeset.
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bill
EDIT: OK, so its a few minutes later, and its not the apple remote.. but using the XBOX HID Driver, and Gamepad companion, the xbox remote was recognized, i mapped the "menu" key to "apple+esc" the arrow buttons to their respective keyynoard keys, and the center "select" button to the spacebar.
works mint!! (but i still want to make this recognize the apple remote, and have the system think it is an apple interface. However, i am MUCH more optomistic about this now. you know, i think maybe my rants dont belong attached to this post anymore. maybe they should be moved to a thread called "IR Remote Hacking" or some other thing?"
So, Im assuming, since the "DVD PLayback Kit" really is just a dumb (i.e. no hardware to lock it into only recieving certian codes) IR reciever. (as I assume apples is) All that i would need to do is to cross reference what ever table the machine looks into when it sees DEVICE IDs and Product IDs and tell it when it sees the MS DVD playback Kit ID's to point to the Apple IR Reciever part. I imagine this would be done somewhere in openfirmware... like when i had to write to the table that shows CPU spped and stuff, since apple never shipped a 1.58, the profiler reported 750MHz... which it is not.... does this sound about right.
so any input would be fun. I know it works with the XBOX remote, and that has more buttons and will actually let me control more things, but i still have to hack front row. I want to build a IR interface + software/firmware patch that makes the machine show up as having shipped with USB, so things like front row, or any other offical apple remote controlled software will just install without a hack.
...Bill
I've been wanting to acomplish the same feat for quite some time. I just got my machine running the way i like, and was going to look into purchasing hardware to test.
In my quest i have run across an custom .kext file that a guy has writen to enable Front Row on machines witout IR. The interesting thing is how the .kext actually works. What you have to do is modify the kext driver file and put the Vender_ID and Device_ID of the mouse you use in the driver file. What this does is trick the OS into thinking the apple remote is being used with the system.
Not sure how accurate that is since it would make more since that it would trick the OS to think that the APPLE USB IR Reciver is available. If that is the case then it may be a simple edit of the file to acomplish what we are trying to do.
Let me know your thoughts...
Something else that may be necessary to know in order to figure out the right hardware to get and use is, what protocols the IR device needs to support.
Just wondering if anyone got anywhere with this yet. I myself have an apple remote and 2 different IR usb receivers. One is from an HP media center, the other from a sony. systmem profiler sees them both as IR usb receivers, one made by SMK, and the other by Phillips. But as you've guessed, the apple remote doesnt work to activate front row or anything else for that matter. I'd really love to be able to use this thing