Main > Main Forum

Advantage of cabinet with internet access?

<< < (5/11) > >>

brihyn:
my cab has a flakey wireless connection, and it kills me.
If I need to do any larger configuration work or whatever, it's much easier to sit at my desk and RDP into the cab then to sit on the bar stool manipulating a keyboard on my lap. And finding the occasional buggy rom, getting VPin setup and working etc, it's just much easier doing it at my desk, letting my pc virus scan everything, and then copying the files over the net.

michelevit:
I like to stream Pandora Internet radio and also the occasional Hulu /youtube video.
I have a simple USB wifi card that I piked up from monoprice. Works great.
I can remove it when the small ones are playing to prevent them from getting online.
I turn off auto updates which also prevents untimley system upgrades.

jelwell:
Here's what I did when I had friends with arcade cabinets.

We all share the same hi scores. I store the hi and nvram directories on an ftp server. (We have not yet upgraded to save state versions). Then I use Webdrive on all the machines to mount the ftp server as if it were a physical drive. Everyone uses identical MAME revisions and ROMs and we all point our hi and nvram directories to the mounted server. It's quite speedy, unless you want to play Simpon's Bowling which has an NVRAM file which is around 8MB (which can take a noticeable number of seconds to load).

If you are going to have your box online then I highly suggest you use an icebox or something similar to "Freeze" your hard drive.
http://dx.com/p/windows-icebox-usb-system-restore-data-recovery-dongle-for-pc-and-laptops-17774

The icebox allows your system to ignore any writes to the hard drive when you reboot. This is great if a system update accidentally is applied or some hacker remotely exploits your OS and installs something that is causing problems - or more likely slowing your machine down. You can configure certain folders to ignore but the rest of the disk is "protected". It works by writing any changes to empty space on your drive and never committing them to the real file system. You can also temporarily disable it if you need to make some changes to your system.

Before I installed something like this I had problems being online.  Mostly from Windows updates but other problems too, like if somone accidentally found my keyboard and broke some key mapping in Mame or Mamewah. It's nice to be able to reboot and have all those changes simply ignored.

As someone else posted, there are also versions of MAME that support network play. So you could play with your friends. I have not tried any recently (as my friends all got rid of their cabinets) but it worked really well when I played it before.
Joseph Elwell.

Fursphere:

--- Quote from: jelwell on August 26, 2013, 02:15:21 pm ---Here's what I did when I had friends with arcade cabinets.

We all share the same hi scores. I store the hi and nvram directories on an ftp server. (We have not yet upgraded to save state versions). Then I use Webdrive on all the machines to mount the ftp server as if it were a physical drive. Everyone uses identical MAME revisions and ROMs and we all point our hi and nvram directories to the mounted server. It's quite speedy, unless you want to play Simpon's Bowling which has an NVRAM file which is around 8MB (which can take a noticeable number of seconds to load).

If you are going to have your box online then I highly suggest you use an icebox or something similar to "Freeze" your hard drive.
http://dx.com/p/windows-icebox-usb-system-restore-data-recovery-dongle-for-pc-and-laptops-17774

The icebox allows your system to ignore any writes to the hard drive when you reboot. This is great if a system update accidentally is applied or some hacker remotely exploits your OS and installs something that is causing problems - or more likely slowing your machine down. You can configure certain folders to ignore but the rest of the disk is "protected". It works by writing any changes to empty space on your drive and never committing them to the real file system. You can also temporarily disable it if you need to make some changes to your system.

Before I installed something like this I had problems being online.  Mostly from Windows updates but other problems too, like if somone accidentally found my keyboard and broke some key mapping in Mame or Mamewah. It's nice to be able to reboot and have all those changes simply ignored.

As someone else posted, there are also versions of MAME that support network play. So you could play with your friends. I have not tried any recently (as my friends all got rid of their cabinets) but it worked really well when I played it before.
Joseph Elwell.

--- End quote ---

How do you deal with fine contention issues?   Meaning two people playing the same ROM at the same time?

michelevit:
there is no problem with sharing a file at the same time.
we have a NAS on our home network and many users can access the file at the same time.  the file isn't 'checked out.'
when someone accesses it.

Navigation

[0] Message Index

[#] Next page

[*] Previous page

Go to full version