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Compact Flash hard drives
garyh:
My upright cab http://web.ukonline.co.uk/gary.hitchen/mame.htm uses CF as a hard drive and the bartop I'm building at present will also do the same.
My website is slightly out of date as I have now also installed DOSCab jukebox and changed to a dual-slot CF IDE adaptor. Slot 1 (primary IDE) has a 256Mb card that boots into DOS and runs ArcadeOS and DMAME. Slot 2 (secondary IDE) has a 1Gb CF full of OGG music files for DOSCab to play. I use this to provide music while I'm working in my garage (how I envy those with dedicated games rooms!).
The bartop will use a single 64Mb CF card bootng into DOS and running Vantage.
A search on eBay for "CF IDE" will give lots of hits for suitable cards. You may need to setup the Cylinders/Heads/Sectors settings in your BIOS. This table may be useful: http://chinese-watercolor.com/LRP/hd/ide-cf.html
Gary
jace055:
This sounds like a great idea! However, I would load to the OS into a ram drive at startup and read the roms from a DVD/CD unless you have enough ram to load the games as well. That would Keep the read and writes off of the drive.
rdagger:
You could use a solid state hard drive:
http://www.contecusa.com/?page=prod_detail&id=58&cat_id=17&prod_id=533&CFID=54981&CFTOKEN=61567898
Check out the speed in this review:
http://www.silentpcreview.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sections&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=49&page=1
anthonylitz:
--- Quote from: Hoagie_one on December 14, 2004, 02:36:08 pm ---i was thinking about using the CF for a hard drive in my new project.....putting a computer for emulation inside of an old SNES case.
Tight space.
--- End quote ---
;D That sounds really cool!!
Anthony
JoyMonkey:
TV Harmony just posted a guide on how to run Windows XP from a CF card. Take a look:
http://www.tvharmony.com/blog/archives/2004/12/booting_windows_1.html
It doesn't mention the writing life-span of CF cards, but it explains how to trim XP down to a size that will fit on a 512mb card.