I use Talchia's Carnival 1.0 MOD, which makes it so that you choose the Darth Revan skin from the beginning of the game.
You can get it here:
http://home.t-online.de/home/Talchia/CarnivalMOD1_0.zip)
The advantage of using it is that you don't need to spawn any items once you're playing the game, you don't have to periodically re-activate the shield (because it gets deactivated at certain critical cutscenes etc) and you also get a proper Darth Revan picture portrait for your character, instead of it looking like the generic model you chose.
The MOD also gives you the ability to play as Master Uthar with Revan's Robes, a Trandoshan, a Rodian, a Duros or a Nikto (the black vulkar aliens).