I'd suggest mounting the board farther forward so that the backplane is recessed even in the hacked case. Then you can re-route the VGA cable within the confines of the case and the connectors of anything else you plug into the I/O panel will be enclosed and it can sit farther back against the wall.
A short, custom HD-15 cable with a right angle connector will clean up the installation and the look quite a lot. Elongating the floppy slot for an optical drive is almost a necessity as I see it.I love the way mine looks with the wider opening and fitted trayloader. When the new close-up lens arrives from China, I'll revisit this hack for the optical bench phase. I'll finish cleaning up the slot and maybe paint the tray after arcing the front to match the curvature of the bezel.
The other option is to make a slot in the cooling vents under the chin for a slotloader installation. I like having the indication of the sleeper within. My Classic is a dedicated Projection System with a standard DVD player. I don't have room for a slotloader under the chin due to using an inverted 6500 MoBo. With the Mini-ITX, you won't have such constraints.
A short, custom HD-15 cable with a right angle connector will clean up the installation and the look quite a lot. Elongating the floppy slot for an optical drive is almost a necessity as I see it.I love the way mine looks with the wider opening and fitted trayloader. When the new close-up lens arrives from China, I'll revisit this hack for the optical bench phase. I'll finish cleaning up the slot and maybe paint the tray after arcing the front to match the curvature of the bezel.
The other option is to make a slot in the cooling vents under the chin for a slotloader installation. I like having the indication of the sleeper within. My Classic is a dedicated Projection System with a standard DVD player. I don't have room for a slotloader under the chin due to using an inverted 6500 MoBo. With the Mini-ITX, you won't have such constraints.