Anyone not using harddisk in their cabinet?

[AE35]

Hi all.

Has anyone tried not using harddisk in their mame cabinet? Is it possible to do it
from a USB stick or the like, while still having a game selection screen?

Or is this wishful thinking?

Thanks,

Nicholas

[shardian]

You can get an adapter that lets you use an SD card as your harddrive. Several people have used this in bartops and the like. Personally, I wouldn't because the reliability of a thumb-drive and or memory cards is questionable, especially after X number of reads and writes.

[Kaytrim]

I used a 512 MB compact flash card and IDE to CF adapter.  The card plugs into the IDE cable just like a HD would.  I loaded SpyStyle's CD (software forum) and it works fine.  I have spares if you want a set.

TTFN
Kaytrim

[JimmyU]

If your'e going harddriveless, I would go with something like this:

Link

No noise, little power consumption, however, they are kind of pricey.

[MonMotha]

CF cards are far more common for this use than SD since a simple passive adapter (a bunch of wires and connectors) makes for really cheap conversions.  They show up to the PC as a normal IDE hard drive, and you can use it as such.  Trying to use USB has some issues, especially with windows, since USB mass storage is emulated as a hard drive by the BIOS, but once the OS loads has to be natively accessed, and most OSes don't support having their main filesystem on USB (Linux can be done with some work, dunno about the BSDs - I've been told this is impossible with Windows).  You could pull DOS off, but beware that it will be ungodly slow on many (though not all) motherboards.

As far as the reliability of flash, it's a helluva lot more reliable than a mechanical hard drive.  Most flash devices are good to at least 10,000 writes per sector.  Many are good to 100,000 or even 1 million.  All good CF cards employ wear leveling to prevent a single sector from being used repeatedly, and they also support sector remapping to map around bad sectors.  Unless you're using it as a swap device (don't, they're far too slow when writing), you will pretty much never wear out a large CF card.

Somebody calculated once that if you were to continuously erase and re-write (the erase is what's limited, not the writes themselves) the flash in the original 16MB iPaq handheld as fast as it would go, it would take 12 years to wear it out.  That's a long time, and not much flash.  Modern flash is faster, but there's so much more of it that you won't have problems.  The erase limitations of flash are VASTLY overstated.  Use a high quality card (like the pro series from Sandisk), and you'll be fine.  Just be aware that writing is rather slow, though reading is fairly quick, at least in comparison.

You can fit a lot onto a 4GB CF card, and these are now reasonably priced.  8 and even 16GB are on the market, though at a cost premium.  Just be aware of how big your OS is: Linux can be tiny (or huge), Win98 is reasonably sized, and XP is usually at least a gig.  Vista is...well, huge: it might fit on the card...  My friend says his install is 7GB, though there's some OEM crap in there.

[Kaytrim]

The boot up on Dad's Bartop using DOS is under 30 seconds to the front end.  When the machine is running all you hear is a tiny whine from the fans.  I am using less than half of the space available.

I tried to install TinyXP on the 512MB CF card and it barely fit.  I can see it being used on a 2 or 4GB card without any problems and still have room for plenty of roms.  This is defiantly an option in my mind for future projects unless I intend to use CHD images.  Then a larger HD is the better option.

Kaytrim

[AE35]

Thanks!

Hey, how are you using DOS? What frontend do you use, and how?

[Kaytrim]

SpyStyle's DOS CD thread... http://forum.arcadecontrols.com/index.php?topic=58809.0;all
You will have to get your roms converted to one of the versions of DOS MAME that is installed.  Google for the rollback set of roms and use clrmamepro to convert your roms to your chosen version.  There are instructions available on how to use the rollback set online as well.  Convert your roms first then follow this link:Look for Sortinfo about 3/4 the way down.  This way you can have a select list of games to load onto the CF card.

[Jouster]

I actually saw somewhere some time ago where someone hacked an IDE floppy connector and used it as an SD plugin port.  The SD card fits perfectly into the slot, and the pins line up just right.  I don't remember what all was needed otherwise to make the change work...I'd google it myself and attach a link...but I'm at work and don't feel like pushing it.

Jouster