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| Any tips for running mame off a CF card? |
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| quarterback:
I have a 2gig CF card lying around and I picked up an IDE adapter for it. I have read about people running mame off of these instead of a hard drive and, since my cocktail cab gets so hot anyway, I've been thinking about it. The biggest concern seems to be the longevity of the card under heavy write/re-write use. Somebody said that they disabled the high-score recording abilities of mame just to avoid this aspect. Should this be a big concern? How would I go about disabling all writing to the card? Also, I'm running Win98, so I'd have to disable the caching of files (virtual memory or whatever they call it) as well if I wanted to avoid the card being written to. Would this cause problems with windows? Anything else I might want to know before trying something like this? Thanks |
| daywane:
I only have XP running on all my PC's hooked up at this moment, so I could be wrong but can you not just right click on the drive and tag it read only? Never used IDE adaptor. My bios on my mother board let me boot to other drives. My card readers show my CPF cards as drives. I did boot off it just for the fun of it once (linux) did nothing more with it , I just tried it for the fun of it I see no problems doing what you want. I do not even see a problem with the constant wrighting to the drive? I have some older cards that I have used for pics and PC file all the time. formated 100's of times ( my Kodak will not see the XP format but XP sees the Kodak format) I have 7 to 8 PC's hooked up all the time.... I use CP flash to transfer files all the time Keep us posted on your plans.... I would like to fallow up on it :cheers: |
| ahofle:
Yeah, personally I'd just leave the writes enabled and back all the files up on a DVD in case it dies. By the time you've reached 10,000 to 1,000,000 writes and the card fails, 40 gig flash cards will be $29.95 at Circuit City. ;D http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling |
| Silver:
Personally, I'd run Dos - with something like gamelauncher. DOS won't write anything to the CF card, it will boot in a couple of seconds (literally) making it a perfect combo for a CF card as an IDE device. So the only writing to the card will be hi-scores, which will be fine for decades. The problem with the re-writes is in windows, particualry XP - estimates vary from 6 months to 2 years on a standard CF card depending on how much you hack XP to lock it down. NB if you are a dab hand with linux, you can mount the boot volume as read-only for the same effect as DOS. In windows - you can not set your system drive to be read-only. |
| MonMotha:
If the card does wear leveling (high end ones do, low end ones generally don't), you pretty much don't need to worry. Even at the maximum erase/write cycle speed the card can sustain, it would take years (often 10s) to wear out a CF card. Flash is a lot more durable than most people believe. For reference, somebody calculated that if you were to erase/write the original 16MB Compaq iPAQ as fast as you could with the writes spread out evenly, it would take about 12 years to reach the guaranteed minimum number of erase cycles. If you did it on only a single sector, it would still take a month or so. This is cycling things as fast as absolutely possible, hardly a normal use pattern. Even cards that don't do wear leveling will often start remapping sectors after they hit a certain erase count, effectively doing some poor man's form of wear leveling. Usually this doesn't result in data loss. If the card doesn't even do that, your filesystem should have some form of bad sector handling. You'll lose some data (one file, probably) if you do manage to wear it out (highly unlikely unless you're using it for a swap file or similar), but still not too bad. Unless MAME is constantly writing the high score files out and you leave the game running 24/7, you probably don't need to worry. Remember that reading flash does not cause any wear at all. I've had Linux based SBC systems running off CF cards for a couple years using it like a normal system (including log files, though there is no swap partiton) and haven't had a problem, though I am using good CF cards. |
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