booting a mame cab really fast....

[krick]

If you want a mame cabinet to boot really fast, I think this will do the trick...

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/10/03/gigabyte_i-ram_ramdisk/

... only problem is that it can't be off for more than 10 hours. 


Seems odd that they don't have some sort of auxilliary power connector.
Most modern power supplies have a 5V standby line that is always powered.
That would do the trick, I think.

EDIT:  found another review...

http://www.tomshardware.com/storage/20050907/

[SirPoonga]

Too bad it is RAM!  Short term memory not good for booting a cabinet

USB flashdisk probably a better route to follow.

[krick]

It's battery backed so you don't loose anything unless you leave it off for over 10 hours.

The problem with flash is that it doesn't take well to repeated writings.  Normal digital camera use is fine but a swap file would trash a flash card in short order.

[RandyT]

To overcome this problem, there should be a redundant hard disk in the system.  That way, if power fails it can automatically refresh the RAM. 

Only slow the first time after failure  Kind of like a giant disk cache

RandyT

[SirPoonga]

It's battery backed so you don't loose anything unless you leave it off for over 10 hours.

The problem with flash is that it doesn't take well to repeated writings.  Normal digital camera use is fine but a swap file would trash a flash card in short order.

then I guess my sandisk cruzer is the exception.  I thrash it pretty hard, even run some simple apps and games off it.

But, there isn't many writings going on anyway.

But then again, one doesn;t need either of these, ramdisks have been around for some time.  Put 2gig of memore in your computer and partition off 500 megs for mame

[krick]

The problem with flash is that it doesn't take well to repeated writings.  Normal digital camera use is fine but a swap file would trash a flash card in short order.

then I guess my sandisk cruzer is the exception.  I thrash it pretty hard, even run some simple apps and games off it.

Running apps isn't a problem.  However, booting windows off of it would be a problem because of how often the swap file gets written to.  You could, however boot off of a flash drive and have a separate small hard drive solely to hold the swap file and other temp files that are rewritten thousands of times daily.

[SirPoonga]

Well, right, but we aren't talking about booting off this thing.  I retract anyway, usb would be slower than this but alot since the original point was speed.

[krick]

Even if you used a compact flash card and an ATA adapter, The i-Ram will blow the doors off of it...

http://www.dansdata.com/io043.htm

And, after paying for Flash memory, you wouldn't get instant startup anyway. CompactFlash cards in ATA mode only support PIO 4, which uses more CPU time than any of the DMA modes that all current ATA hard drives support, and can only shift data at a theoretical maximum of 16.7 megabytes per second, which is rather slower than the sustained read speed of various high density consumer drives these days. The card may also have its own overhead that makes the real transfer rate a lot lower.

A memory card has negligible seek time, which can be very handy for some things and certainly doesn't hurt for system startup. But the low transfer rate will kill the advantage.

And, even if that didn't bother you, you'd still need a hard drive to put your swap file on, because NT-series Windows flavours can't run without swap no matter how much physical RAM they've got. You can't put the swap file on the CompactFlash card, because of the limited write cycles the memory supports. You can, if you want to be devious, put the swap file on a RAM disk, but that doesn't actually improve system performance significantly.

[rdagger]

Since were talking boot time, the review states that the i-Ram boots Windows XP in 31 seconds compared to 35 seconds with a 10K RPM drive.  For a MAME cabinet, I don't see any benefit when you are just saving 4 seconds.  Especially if there is a power outage for more than 16 hours and you drive goes blank.

[JustMichael]

Just use dos...   

[Abomination]

Toshiba announced a solid state hard disk for thier notebooks coming out in the next month or so, could use one of those...

But I think the fastest booting time possible would be with a raptor raid0, should be faster even than this wierd solid state pci thing.

[NiN^_^NiN]

you can just use hibernation or standby :p

Or u could go to the trouble of using EFW from XP Embedded so everytime u turn the PC on it loads up a hibernation file which opens up at the frontend screen.

u can just turn it off and it reloads the same image over and over again so u don't have to worry about any memory leaks if there were any from playing a game that wa big.

[Lilwolf]

yeah, I see the real advantage is persistent memory.  But heck, if they added a +5volt power supply and not got power through the PCI slot it would be a LOT better in my opinion.  Then with a batter backup, you really have a good solution... And then have ghost running on a harddrive that would restore it if empty.  Now that might be useful.

But saving 4 seconds doesn't seem worth it.  But I bet those number really climb if you have a 'normal' system setup.  Or if your running 98

[JoeB]

flash memory is much slower than HD.  This can be seen by the slower performance of devices like the iPOD nano and shuffle when compared to the regular HD based player.

As far as hibernation goes, the more RAM you have, the slower the boot up is (since it needs to copy the RAM image from the HD).  I have a 2.4Ghz AMD CPU in my machine, and it boots in ~30 seconds.  What's the big deal? Even if it takes 2 minutes.. click the button, got get a beer.. by the time you're ready to play, the system will be waiting for you.

 

[whammoed]

flash memory is much slower than HD.

[TurboC--]

What bugs me is, my MAME machine is a Compaq and the damn Compaq logo is on for like 10 seconds every time you turn it on.  Wish I could find a way to disable it... but I think the only way would be to replace the MOBO or flash the BIOS (with a non-existant ROM most likely)

[krick]

What bugs me is, my MAME machine is a Compaq and the damn Compaq logo is on for like 10 seconds every time you turn it on.  Wish I could find a way to disable it... but I think the only way would be to replace the MOBO or flash the BIOS (with a non-existant ROM most likely)

If you could get a copy of the BIOS file, I bet you could hex-edit out the logo if you could figure out where it was.

You sure someone doesn't have a tool already to do this?

What is the exact compaq model?

Is there any info that says what type of BIOS it is (award, phoenix, ami) while booting?

You might need to hit a key (tab?) while booting to see it.

There might also be an option in the BIOS settings to always show the post information instead of the splash screen.

[stratjakt]

If it's the right model you can hack your own spash screen into the BIOS.

But, on topic, what's wrong with just hibernating the PC instead of shutting it down?  It's the same thing, electrically..

[krick]

If it's the right model you can hack your own spash screen into the BIOS.

But, on topic, what's wrong with just hibernating the PC instead of shutting it down?  It's the same thing, electrically..

1) Hibernation doesn't work with DOS or Win9x

2) If you have 4GB of memory, it has to save and restore a 4GB hibernation file.  I can't imagine this would be very fast.

3) Rebooting a computer from time to time is good because it cleans up memory leaks and whatnot.  If you always hibernate, this never happens.

[Flinkly]

well first, what is the problem we're looking to solve?  speed of bootup, or being able to see the bootup screens for 30 seconds?  if you wanted to shut it down normally, then just to that, start it back up, and then hibernate it.  my problem with hibernation is that damn password thing when it starts back up, otherwise i'd just hibernate.  as for hiding the screens, why not just turn your monitor on after you know it's in your FE, like a delayed power on, pwerstrip can do that up to 35 seconds.

[stratjakt]

1) dont use DOS or Win95.  Actually, some machines can hibernate in DOS as the functionality is built into the hardware (many laptops, for instance).    Of course, boot time into DOS isn't really the issue here.   DOS can boot off of HDD faster than the average arcade monitor can warm up.  I'd actually think linux would be the perfect OS for an arcade machine, if not out of many folks ability to configure.  Maybe it's time for an arcade distro..

2) WTF would you need 4 gigs of memory in an arcade cabinet for?  You wouldn't have a good reason for this much RAM in any gaming rig.  Don't let the "x-treme PC" posers fool you.  Even so, 4 gigs from a good fast SATA drive would probably still be faster than a warm reboot of a full-out XP Pro install.

3)  So reboot once in a while.  This isn't much of a problem in XP, but it can happen if the application software is poorly designed/written.  I rarely reboot the PC in my office, and when I have to, it's because something I've coded borked it all up.  Still, it's yet another good reason for a dedicated linux arcade distro, though.

At any rate, a solid-state drive, RAM or otherwise, won't significantly increase your boot time.  Sure the actual load times will be quicker, but most of the time you're waiting is for services to start, hardware to be initialized, waiting for DHCP negotiation on the network, auto-discovery and all that stuff.

If you trim out all unneeded services (a standalone mame box should need, well, virtually none of them) boot time should be no problem.


IIRC, you can nix the password thing by killing the windows logon client service.

[krick]

what is the problem we're looking to solve?

Basically, we're just looking at new, really expensive technology, and fantasizing about how it might fit into the "

[TurboC--]

If you could get a copy of the BIOS file, I bet you could hex-edit out the logo if you could figure out where it was.  You sure someone doesn't have a tool already to do this?  What is the exact compaq model?  Is there any info that says what type of BIOS it is (award, phoenix, ami) while booting?

There are no relevant BIOS options, checked.  Compaq Presario 5155.  BIOS screen lists "686A1  01/21/99".  I doubt the BIOS has ever been flashed. 

The main issue is that I want to boot as fast as possible, so I minimize running my 19" standard-res arcade monitor at a bad frequency (Happ Vision Pro.)  I don't have the whole cab setup yet, but... I figured I would just have to wait and plug in the monitor after booting, every time I powered up.  Otherwise I can get some kind of smart power strip or something... if it exists.

[krick]

The main issue is that I want to boot as fast as possible, so I minimize running my 19" standard-res arcade monitor at a bad frequency (Happ Vision Pro.)  I don't have the whole cab setup yet, but... I figured I would just have to wait and plug in the monitor after booting, every time I powered up.  Otherwise I can get some kind of smart power strip or something... if it exists.

Running an arcade monitor at the wrong frequency will likely damage it regardless of how much you "minimize" the time.

In my opinion, the best solution is to use a J-PAC because it divides the 30KHz signal in half to protect your monitor.

If you're not going with a JAMMA setup, Andy will sell you the divider chip and a schematic if you're interested in building the circuit yourself...

http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=24300.0

[TurboC--]

Sounds like a good idea.