an Idea...

[dreamakuma]

Well I got this stupid idea while getting my busted leg looked at(my cab landed on it). I took some of my mame roms and ran it through mame32, and put them on my flash drive. At the doctors office , he has a spare pc he keeps lying around (no idea on the specs, but it's a P4, with XP), I deciced to give my mame a shot, and it had no noticable slowdown or loss in proformance! so my question is, would it be fine if I had an X-arcade dual hooked up to one usb port, and a flash drive on the other? I'm thinking if I have a smaller hard drive I could save money, and a flash drive would last longer(no moving parts?) maybe get a small powered hub to run different game emulators on different flash drives( I play mame, GENS, and snes 9xw,...and the occisional neorage). what would be the downsides to this? I don't care if my cab shows windows(at the moment,every time you turn it on, you see DREAMCAST, so who's kidding?). Opinions?

[severdhed]

that should work, but you will be limited with the amount of roms you can fit on the flash drive... my mame .124 rom set is 16.4gb not counting chd's.  also, you can get an 250gb sata hard drive for $39 at newegg.com

[Turnarcades]

Already done this. Can't find the thread at the moment, but I did it with a 4-port USB hub, 4Gb flash pen and twin-port USB joypads, set up in Windows to launch MAME when plugged into your PC.

I did it after seeing a similar video on youtube. Search for 'removable mame' or something siilar and you will find it.

[daywane]

Mame 56 set is smaller than 4 gig
Mame 36 fits on CD
a 4 gig thumb drive can be found often a Wal Mart for under $20.00
I keep a set of thumb drives ready.
"EDIT"
I almost forgot USB 1.0 and USB 2.0  BIG Difference

[wooowman93]

wow you guys make it so complicated  all you do is a version of mame put in all the roms you want on the usb, plug it in with the xarcade and play and configure the controls to work with it

[wooowman93]

i do it all the time at school but we just use the keyboard works ok...

[Jack Burton]

You plan on putting this in a cab right?

Not sure why you would want to do this.   It's easier, more economical, faster, and safer to put your roms on a hard drive.

If you are just wanting to take MAME around with your X-arcade stick for portable gaming, then this should work like a charm.

[TOK]

Flash drive sounds like a great idea, particularly if you drop it on your leg.

[daywane]

You plan on putting this in a cab right?

Not sure why you would want to do this.   It's easier, more economical, faster, and safer to put your roms on a hard drive.

If you are just wanting to take MAME around with your X-arcade stick for portable gaming, then this should work like a charm.

joymonkey has a version that works on a boot floppy.
no need for hard drive at all 
hard drives were not this cheep before

[dreamakuma]

I was thinking fastening a hub on the outside of the cab to hold my flashdrives and the X-arcade going directly into my other usb port. when i plug it in, play. If my hard drive dies, still got the roms & mame. I have an 8 gig flash drive and all I'm using is mame 32 and mostly cps2/neogeo games. that way I can also play on the go.

[Lecithin]

Flash drive sounds like a great idea, particularly if you drop it on your leg.

 

[u_rebelscum]

You probably don't have to worry about this, but I'll bring it up anyway.

Flash drives have a lower write times before failure than hard drives.  Mame saves to the cfg files every time that game is exited, as well as nvram or diff if the game has it.  To increase the flash drive's life span, you might want to have these saved to you hard drive by changing the CORE OUTPUT DIRECTORY OPTIONS in mame.ini to folders in the HD.  SSD (solid state drives) have write leveling algorithms in the firmware that extend their life spans; most flash thumb drives ATM don't have them.

Mind you, the flash write times is something in the order of 1,000 to 10,000 times (vs HD's 100,000), so it probably would be years before you start seeing problems due to write times.

[RayB]

There is no reason running off a Flash drive should be any "slower" unless you're streaming data (ie: CHD games)