Portable MAME drive

[Nogginboink]

I'm new to the MAME/homebuilt arcade world and have a quick question.

I'd like to put MAME and a front-end on a portable hard drive that I can move from computer to computer.  In order to do this, any software that I install must not do things like write to the registry or put files in system folders; all files and data must be on the portable drive. Also, any programs would have to find files through the use of relative, and not absolute, paths.

I'm under the impression that MAME will work just fine under these conditions.

Are there any front-ends that would work under these limitations?

[severdhed]

mala should work just fine

[Turnarcades]

There have been many discussions on this idea and I (as well as others have created casual portable devices using flash drives. Bear in mind though that the wisdom of using a removable/external drive for regular gaming use is questionable though as the constant read/write cycles made by emulators creating/loading/saving config and save files may slow down performance or cause errors over time.

[Samstag]

I used to run MAME from a cdrom years ago.  I think that was using Mame32 as a front end.  The only issue I had was all config setups had to be done before burning.  So running from a writable drive or USB stick can only be easier than that.

Use a simple front end that doesn't write data all the time and the deterioration issues Turnarcades warned about won't be an issue.  It also won't require any installation or changes to the registry.

[ark_ader]

There have been many discussions on this idea and I (as well as others have created casual portable devices using flash drives. Bear in mind though that the wisdom of using a removable/external drive for regular gaming use is questionable though as the constant read/write cycles made by emulators creating/loading/saving config and save files may slow down performance or cause errors over time.

I use Compact Flash in my sub-mini cabinets as I can boot to them using old Thinkpads.  I have one that gets played with regularly and there is no sign of any errors or anything being described by Turnarcades.  You can have it run DSL and have it load into memory (128mb) and pull the roms with Xmame off the flashdrive, assuming that the pen drive is boot-able, and the machine can boot from it, etc.

I have a new build runinng MicroXP, and Mame32 with Daphne, and it works just fine. The newer pen drives have more capacity and durability than pen of drives 2 years ago.  Heck we are now looking at 32gb SSD drives, so it seems to be a better alternative than running off a CDROM.  I wish it was the same price though....

There is a lot of trial and error, and experimenting.  I went through 5 pen drives of several makes before I found one that could be read by the laptop at boot.  CF cards are more durable and have better capacities, and you can substitute the laptop drive very easily, if this is the direction you are looking at going.

[z]

I have used mala on a USB thumb drive with no problems (standard use, not booting up to it).  You do need to make sure the external drive gets assigned the same drive letter on each computer it is hooked to otherwise your mala config mapping to rom directories, etc. will be thrown off.

[Nogginboink]

I have used mala on a USB thumb drive with no problems (standard use, not booting up to it).  You do need to make sure the external drive gets assigned the same drive letter on each computer it is hooked to otherwise your mala config mapping to rom directories, etc. will be thrown off.

That's exactly the issue I want to avoid.  I'm going to try Mala and see if it'll take relative paths.