I saw an article in Popular Science (http://www.popsci.com.au/node/30580) about reflashing old wireless routers to link your Xbox 360 into your wireless network for basically no cost at all. I have a Netgear DG834G lying around that I never used - so I want to reflash it to run DD-WRT firmware (or OpenWRT) and Tomato too if possible.

I've been researching for about an hour, but because I don't really know anything about networking (I wish I did) I also don't really know what I've been reading.

So perhaps you guys could help me out? What do you know? Any answer's helpful.

I know that both the DD-WRT and WRT54G project pages have quite exhaustive compatibility lists, and that you can find those from google.

DD-WRT is a lot more "user-friendly" than WRT54G, but WRT54G is probably better if you know what you're doing.

First reply didn't take very long.

First place I had a looksee were the compatibility pages. My Netgear D384G wasn't listed on any of them, even the exhaustive list on the DD WRT site - however, I have gathered that these lists are perhaps merely a compilation of models numbers for routers that the programmers garuantee will work without any fiddling. How did I get that? I think I read people running these programs on unlisted routers.

The DG384G does come up in searches to do with what I want to do, but I can't make any sense of what I'm reading in them. I don't know what they're saying, could be that it doesn't work. And I don't know the difference between DG384G, DG384GT, and DG384N (and whatother variants there may be).

On the WRT54G; is that a typo (confused it with OpenWRT or something?), because I think that's a router made by LinkSys. Good ol' LinkSys and their livechat.

I use DD-WRT. Its much more capable than the stock linksys firmware, but I wish it had more features.
That router will probably not work with dd-wrt. I didnt check open-wrt, or tomato router.
I had a router shaped like that. It constantly dropped connections, which is probably why it was on sale for $15.