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Multiple hard drives
IG-88:
Maybe this should be in the software forum but I'll try here first. I have quite a few old hard drives in the 1-7GB range that I would like to use for Mame. What I wanted to know is can a person "split" the mame software up across 2-3 drives? For example using 3, 2gig HD's for all the needed software. ie: 1 drive for the O/S, 1 drive for the Mame exe, and 1 drive for roms and art work ect. Can a person make multiple partitions across different HD's and have Mame and the O/S work with all of them or is that even possible? Can you even put more than 1 HD in a computer? Does the mobo have to be RAID capable to do that? I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?
brained:
--- Quote ---I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?
--- End quote ---
You can put up to 4 IDE drives in your computer, but remember that most internal CDroms, DVD, CDRW, are IDE so your sacrificing those ports.
I think you can configure the frontend to handle different locations of roms, mame has no problems with that, but I haven't tried that out. Try tweaking with the settings of the FE to find out.
John:
First thing first, yes you can put more than 1 hard drive in your computer assuming you don't already have a Cdrom on the same IDE chain.
Most modern systems have 2 IDE channels which allows you to have 4 IDE devices total (any combinations of IDE harddrives or IDE optical drives)
You can also add more IDE channels by getting IDE controller cards which will give you the ability to add more harddrives to your box.
As to splitting MAME directories, I believe (at least in MAME32 you can insert multiple directories for roms and artworks or whatever you want. So MAME can look under multiple directories (in your case drive letters and paths) for roms and artworks.
In your mame.ini it'd look like this.
rompath roms;d:\yourpath;e:\yourpath
where each additional path you want is separated by a ;
John
IG-88:
--- Quote from: brained on June 24, 2004, 04:59:15 pm ---
--- Quote ---I assume you can at least put 2 HD's in a system with one set as a master and one as a slave. What about a 3rd or even 4th one?
--- End quote ---
You can put up to 4 IDE drives in your computer, but remember that most internal CDroms, DVD, CDRW, are IDE so your sacrificing those ports.
I think you can configure the frontend to handle different locations of roms, mame has no problems with that, but I haven't tried that out. Try tweaking with the settings of the FE to find out.
--- End quote ---
Ya, thats right. I just started working with Kymaera which I love. I think it could do that. And as for the other internal drives once I get all the software installed (via pen drive and USB external drives) I would only need them for repairs or upgrades...
IG-88:
--- Quote from: John on June 24, 2004, 05:04:19 pm ---You can also add more IDE channels by getting IDE controller cards which will give you the ability to add more harddrives to your box.
John
--- End quote ---
I didn't know about those controller cards. Thats encouraging. Thanks peoples!