Of course the first boot didn't work and I needed to take it back apart to see what was wrong. For some reason I couldn't use the IDE cable to control both the DVD and hard drives and wound up going to two separate cables.

A note from Mini-ITX: This will probably have been an IDE conflict. Common or garden 80-wire IDE cables are orientation specific, and have a master (black), slave (grey) and motherboard (blue) position. HDDs have a jumper or "cable select" (i.e. determined by cable position) master/slave setting. Slimline optical drives are configured as *either* master or slave at the factory, and it is not possible to change this setting without reflashing them. It's invariably easier (and usually faster) to connect with two cables. More info here.

I got things working and put it all together. The buttons are the ones that originally played the sounds but now power on the computer (the guns move too) and eject the DVD. Remember when I said everything almost fit? It turns out the mouse/ keyboard PS2 connector was sticking up a little too much and kept the back from closing all the way. I already disconnected the audio connectors from the motherboard and when I have some time to take this back apart, I'll remove the PS2 ones as well. There's no room for a full USB connector so until I find an L-shaped USB cable, it's going to stay like this.

Here are some shots showing the EL wire doing its thing. Sorry about the bad quality. You can see the LCD panel I had hooked up while testing. The desktop has since been changed to an appropriate star wars theme complete with sounds. I guess I didn't need to save the sound boards after all.

P.S. I can't wait for the Nano boards. I've got Boba Fett's Slave 1 just begging to be gutted :)