The size of mame???

[zzsprade]

G'day guys and girls. Just a quick question which I needed to fire away before I buy a new hard drive. What is the file size of the entire rom set of mame these days, plus what extra space will be required for extra goodies that can be used with mame. Ball park... exact..... any ideas? Cheers guys!

-Alex

[CitznFish]

~7 gigs

[Smack]

Personally, I'd go bigger than that, especially with the new .chd files and such.

Plus if you end up installing other PC games on it (set up virtual CD drives), Visual Pinball, etc.

Drives are so cheap, I'd throw a 20 or 40 gig in there. (You can never have enough space...)

My 2 cents.
Smack

[Howard_Casto]

The rule of thumb is that every year you get the hardrive around 100$ and you get the most storage per dollar.  This year you can get a 120 gig for around that price.  That sounds like way too much but trust me, I am a developer but I have almost 200 gigs of data right now and half of it is emulation related roms/artwork/ect.  Don't even bother getting anything smaller than 60 gigs unless you get a super deal on it.  

[Odonadon]

Well, if you want an average system without having every single ROM for every single system known to man, and have a decent MP3 collection on there as well, ~7GB will do you just fine.  I have all the MAME ROMs I, my significant other, or my friends will ever play (about 900) and some SNES, NES, Genesis, and TG16 ROMs, as well as a decent MP3 library on my machine, game snapshots, etc. and I still have over 3GB free.

CitznFish is right.

BUT, if you're buying new, you aren't going to find yourself a 7GB.  I'd say go 40GB.  Decent price, and you won't have gigs and gigs of space to waste.

Odonadon

[zzsprade]

Cheers guys!

[mkdevo]

when i first built my system, i thought i would be more than happy with a 40gb drive.. but i wanted a total emulation station, with every rom for every system.. needless to say, that 40gb filled up FAST!

i just dropped a 120gb drive in there, and i think i'll be all set with that.. i ghosted the 40gb drive over, and ditched it. the only thing i may do now is upgrade to an 8mb cache drive at some point, but for now, i'm golden..

[BobA]

I have a vertical cab with a limited number of games (600)that is happy with 8 GB but unless you are looking for  old bargain drives go for one with 40 to 60 GB. This seems to be the most common size being put in mass market systems and are fairly cheap.

You can always add 100 GB or more later when the price of these drives comes down.

Just my 2 cents.

BobA

[MameFan]

I just finished a COMPLETE set of .64 a month or so ago.  Took 12 1/2  700 meg cd's = 8.55 Gig

This included, ALL roms, ALL chd files, plus verified archives of the sounds, artwork (bezels and backgrounds), marquees, control panels, cabinets, icons, screenshots, title screens), plus ALL known non-mac versions of the executables, front ends (including Emulaxian) and ad-ins, Linux boot images, AMD, P4 cross-compiles, etc..  Yeah, virtutally everything available.

Of course, now .65 and .66 are out, but at least no new .chd's were added.  I would expect it's just under 9 gig for the "world".