Just Startin' Out!

[Jane-Aspinall]

This may seem something of a tedious submission to some of you more seasoned pros - but is it at all possible to set up downloaded arcade roms to boot from a hard drive? I'm suggesting a hard drive that has nothing else on it other than the game.  

I'm absolutely perplexed as to how arcade "boards" function and looking for a cheaper alternative. I'd love an arcade machine of my very own that performs as though it were freshly plucked from an amusement centre. Please offer some guidance. Pwetty please!  

[DaemonCollector]

2 things, this should probably go to software. And, you may be able to rig something up using an embedded device and an embeded Linux OS that autoboots into mame running the rom. The only dif would be a slight startup time at the begining. :/

[Minwah]

is it at all possible to set up downloaded arcade roms to boot from a hard drive? I'm suggesting a hard drive that has nothing else on it other than the game.  

Yes  That's essentially what we all do...I suppose the difficult part is getting it to not look like a PC - how you go about this depends really what OS you want to use.

Just out of interest, do you want to run multiple games or just one?

[Buddabing]

This may seem something of a tedious submission to some of you more seasoned pros - but is it at all possible to set up downloaded arcade roms to boot from a hard drive? I'm suggesting a hard drive that has nothing else on it other than the game.  

I'm absolutely perplexed as to how arcade "boards" function and looking for a cheaper alternative. I'd love an arcade machine of my very own that performs as though it were freshly plucked from an amusement centre. Please offer some guidance. Pwetty please  

You can fit DOS, a tiny compile of MAME and a reasonable size ROM onto a floppy disk. So you don't really need a hard drive.

You can also use a small thumb drive and boot from that (your motherboard needs to allow this)

You just want one game, right? Which one?