Is a hard drive necessary?

[txcanoeman]

I'm thinking of building a few bartop cabinets; one with a 4 way stick, one with an 8 way stick, one with a 2 way stick and left right rotate buttons, and one with a trackball and spinner.

These bartops wouldn't need much more than a low-end pentium to play the older one-player-at-a-time games.  I was wondering if instead of putting hard-drives in them, if I could just put MSDOS/FREEDOS, MAME and the roms on a CD and run the computer from that.  Does anyone know if it is possible?  Or worth the effort?

[BombProofPlane]

it would load slow but sure you can i would not recommend it because small hds are real cheap

[SirPoonga]

you;d have to setup mame ahead of time,with all the ini files and cfg files, but you could.  If you want, you could just have a small hd to store cfg files, then run everything else off cd.

[MameFan]

Get a Dazzle USB compact flash reader/writer ($20 or less after rebates), then a cheap compact flash (or smart media or memory stick)  card for storage of things that can change...    No moving parts, but do need to use an OS that can read USB.

[txcanoeman]

I was worried about getting older small harddrives and then having them go bad in a few years.  But I could buy newer drives and just not worry about the multi gig space I wouldn't be using.

[MameFan]

Actually if you're concerned with size/space... Pick up a cheap old 1 gig-sized notebook hard drive for next to nothing, and a 2.5 to 3.5" IDE converter.  Could basically mount that drive above the PCI slots or something.

[Dink]

2.1GB IDE hard drive $19.

Enough for a MAME32 install and Windows 98SE.

http://www.piranhatech.com/products/viewproduct.asp?catid=1008&subcatid=2035&manufacturer=QUANTUM&productid=2981

[Lilwolf]

I would consider going CDRom and Dos...

but if you do this, I would go with a decent amount of ram and load as much as possible into memory (if not all).

512 mg is only a hundred bucks or so... and you could load everything there

[SirPoonga]

actaully, dos doesn't efficiently use over 128, hey, it was used in the days 4megs was alot.

[AlanS17]

A CD drive will take up more room than a HD and you can get a cheapo hard drive for the price of a CD drive.

If space is an issue, the HD wins.
If convenience is an issue, HD wins.
If placement is an issue, HD wins.
If performance is an issue, HD wins.
If price is an issue, it's a tie.

There's no reason not to use a hard drive. Keep a back-up on CD if it makes you feel safer, but likelihood of crashing is slim. You don't need an old drive. Get a cheap, slow, new drive. Faster drives wouldn't benefit you on a old mother board's bus speed anyways, and slower drives are cheaper too.

To me, he best place to get a cheap HD is:
http://www.ubid.com

It's an auction site, but not like Ebay. Imagine a Best Buy with everything on the shelves up for auction... (Though it's harder than it used to be to get a deal ever since it got more popular.)

Even better, convince a friend he needs to upgrade his hard drive and then just steal his old one.  

[Lilwolf]

I've never tried....

but with win98 making a bootable disk.... I believe the emm386 handles as much as windows98 itself.

then for the ramdisk.

but actually the best solution (by far) would be going with linux.  It's MUCH better for command line stuff.... and being able to boot from anything... and using memory (ultrahle was faster running through wine then on the same win98 machine... isn't that just sad!)

[txcanoeman]

Thanks all.  Great feedback.  It's been a couple of years since I built my first cabinet so I am really looking forward to doing it again.

I should be able to build several Bartops for fairly cheap.  You can pick up low-end pentiums for $50 or less with a hard drive.  Since there will be few controls, I will go with keyboard hacks over the IPAC which I have in my cabinet now.  

Andy has some great stuff but I hacked a keyboard 4 years ago and it worked fine.  I will use an OPTIPAC for the trackball spinner bartop.

The one thing I'm thinking about doing is buying Oscar's 4 way restricter thingy.  Even though I have a 4 way WICO stick that is supposed to retrict the movement, it doesn't always respond properly.