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Any tips for running mame off a CF card?
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quarterback:
Thanks for all the replies.

I was not aware of the concept of "wear levelling", so that's great to know.  With the minimal amount of writing/re-writing and having it spread across the CF card, I think I'd be fine.  And if I get rid of/minimize the amount of Win98/OS file caching, then even better.

The main question on that front would be whether or not my Kingston Elite Pro CF card does any wear levelling at all.  A quick search indicates that their Elite Pro 8GB card uses it.  I'll just have to see but, if it does, then I think the 10,000 to 100,000 cycle estimate, when written across the card, will take care of me until 40GB CF cards are free at Circuit City :)

Silver's probably right in suggesting DOS.  I'd contemplated it, but I just don't like the available front ends for DOS (at least, the ones I've seen) I like using MameWah.  So, unless this eats a hole in my CF card in a month or so, it looks like I'll at least give it a shot using Win98.

Thanks y'all



jhanson:
I'm not sure that wear leveling applies when you're using a CF card with an IDE adapter.  The reason is that the PC sees it as a normal IDE drive, and writes to it like a normal IDE drive.  I could be wrong, but I wouldn't count on the wear leveling in that usage scenario.

One way to save on writes, is to setup a RAM drive and direct the high score files and the CWSDPMI caching to it.  You can always have a shutdown procedure that copies the high score files back to the drive at the end if you really want to save your scores.
lloydcom:
I have a 128MB CF card and a 1 Gb card that go into my 365x Thinkpads to reduce the weight and power consumption.  These old laptops are great for firewalls, test rigs, domain controllers or even for a bartop.  Looking at the recent Project entry someone had the same idea.

My CFs are connected via PCMCIA cards and I have Windows 98SE on a 50MB footprint, with a ramdrive of 16mb for swap and it zooms at warp speed.  Writes are near minimal and booting is very quick.

All with Mame and the 80's roms, Nes and related Emus fit with Windows on a 128MB CF card I bought for
MonMotha:
The wear leveling is applied by the controller inside the CF card, if it is done.  The "real CF" interface and IDE compatibility mode should not affect this for a properly made CF card.  Again see the issue with crappy CF cards.

Wear leveling is not done in software on modern CF cards.  Old CF cards that presented themselves as linear flash (similar to old PCMCIA memory cards) did require that you perform wear leveling in software if you wanted it, but they are a very different beast than modern cards.  Windows/Linux won't even see such cards as standard hard drives (you'd need the MTD interface stuff in Linux, and Windows needs special drivers), and they won't work in an IDE<->CF adapter.
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