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Author Topic: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??  (Read 2319 times)

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vettetek

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Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« on: March 10, 2012, 03:13:03 pm »
Hey guys  - been away a long time. I was wondering what I should use for a super fast bootup into 1 game - no menu whatsoever?
I looked into advanceCD and others, and everything I find is way old and outdated.
Is there anyone making a usb or sdcard bootable mame that can be reduced down to no menu and 1 game?
I have some failed hardware in my cab thats rare and its easier at this point to just run a super stripped version of MAME.
Any help / direction is appreciated!
Thanks!

EightBySix

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #1 on: March 10, 2012, 04:35:50 pm »
use DOS - you can get it free. I got a compact flash card adaptor and an IDE adaptor. Plugs straight in and boots in seconds. All you need then is a batch file to run your game.

MacGyver

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #2 on: March 11, 2012, 03:58:51 am »
DOS is great, but might be a pain if your hardware isn't old.  Unless your soundcard is "soundblaster" compatible, and the manufacturer has included DOS drivers, you'll have no sound.  The video output will be 640x480 too.  Almost all hardware needs it's own specific DOS driver to work under DOS, including USB devices.

Try one of the "tiny" flavors of Linux, and a Linux version of MAME, the learning curve will only be slightly higher than if you were trying to learn how to setup memory, soundcard, cdrom, and mouse dirvers in DOS with config.sys and autoexec.bat.

A third off the wall choice would be using a Win PE for either Vista or Win 7.  Using WIAK and injecting your needed drivers and modifying the startup to run a single MAME game.  It can run from CDROM or a USB, and will always run the same way because it runs an image from a RAMdrive and is read only.  The learning curve for that is huge, and unless your CPU is 5GHZ it will be slower to boot than the other options.

Le Chuck

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #3 on: March 11, 2012, 09:30:38 am »
Check out Tiny XP.  You can set it up first and then create a boot loader image for it.  All you'll need to do is ensure that the settings are all set to a clean no image boot and then put a batch file in the startup folder.  I've seen these load in as little as about 8 seconds from startup providing you have a zippy bios. 

What's the project? 

Howard_Casto

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #4 on: March 11, 2012, 03:22:59 pm »
Check out Tiny XP.  You can set it up first and then create a boot loader image for it.  All you'll need to do is ensure that the settings are all set to a clean no image boot and then put a batch file in the startup folder.  I've seen these load in as little as about 8 seconds from startup providing you have a zippy bios. 

What's the project? 

You don't even have to bother with tiny xp.... regular xp will work just fine.  What you wanna do is run msconfig after you've set windows up and turn off pretty much everything in the startup section.  You'd be suprised how quick windows is when it doesn't load all it's networking and terminal services garbage at bootup.

Le Chuck

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #5 on: March 11, 2012, 05:04:38 pm »
Check out Tiny XP.  You can set it up first and then create a boot loader image for it.  All you'll need to do is ensure that the settings are all set to a clean no image boot and then put a batch file in the startup folder.  I've seen these load in as little as about 8 seconds from startup providing you have a zippy bios. 

What's the project? 

You don't even have to bother with tiny xp.... regular xp will work just fine.  What you wanna do is run msconfig after you've set windows up and turn off pretty much everything in the startup section.  You'd be suprised how quick windows is when it doesn't load all it's networking and terminal services garbage at bootup.

How do you run regular XP off a USB/sdcard?

Howard_Casto

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #6 on: March 11, 2012, 05:21:14 pm »
You don't!  You wouldn't want to anyway because usb/sd cards are significantly slower than a regular harddrive. 

I mean yeah if you have usb 3.0 ports and a 3.0 optimized thumb drive that might work..... otherwise your only benefit is lower power consumption.

Le Chuck

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #7 on: March 11, 2012, 06:20:59 pm »
Makes sense, I only ask based on the OP's comments.  Thought you may have had a trick up your sleeve I wasn't tracking.  I haven't noticed a huge speed boost in XP vs TinyXP but use Tiny because I've got a build configured that goes in preconfigured for cab use.

Howard_Casto

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Re: Single Game quick bootup - Which os/FE??
« Reply #8 on: March 11, 2012, 06:43:57 pm »
Makes sense, I only ask based on the OP's comments.  Thought you may have had a trick up your sleeve I wasn't tracking.  I haven't noticed a huge speed boost in XP vs TinyXP but use Tiny because I've got a build configured that goes in preconfigured for cab use.

Well don't get me wrong... for general usage there should be any significant difference between the two in terms of mame (mame generally loads the whole rom into memory, so hdd speed is irrelevant) but in terms of trying to speed up the boot process there isn't any real benefit to using a usb/sd card and if anything the slow write speeds are going to slow things down. 

Actually though, I DO have a utility to copy a full xp disc onto a usb stick and it also allows you to install xp to a stick as well.  You just need one that's big enough.