Shared Network drive for ROMs?

[CM]

Has anyone setup their cabinet and FE to use a shared network drive for their ROM storage?  I am getting tired of ROM and preview image/video maintenance on the cab and want to change it over so my main PC can "host" everything.  What are the Pros/Cons of this (other than network being down and drive-letter assignment setups)?

[NOP]

I have it this way for all of my emulators that are on my xbox currently, and as soon as I get my motherboard with gigabit on it, I'll do the same with my dedicated MAME machine.

I see no drawbacks personally-it's fast, 1 source for all of your ROMs, easy to maintain on a real computer with a real keyboard, multiple machines can access the collection.  I even toy with the idea of having my MAME machine network boot and do away with the hard drive completely.

ok, maybe 2 drawbacks:

1) having to be tethered to your server.  Taking your machine to a remote location is out of the question.

2) no 2ndary backup of your collection in case your PC dies.

Totally, completely worth it if you ask me, especially if you have the network lines running throughout your house so it isn't cluttered.

-jeff!

[u_rebelscum]

I don't have mame currently set up this at home, but similar stuff at work and tested it at home, and  I agree with NOP.  I'll just add

3) Version maintenance/syncing issues.  EG, If you share the same ROM folder, and update your main PC mame more often than the cab, you might have problems.  (You did hint at continuous file maintenance....)

But doing the file maintenance from the main PC is much easier, and nothing wrong (besides disk space) with keeping multiple sets of different versions ROMs on one computer.

[CM]

Good feedback so far. 

#1 is not an issue since my cab is upstairs and weighs more than I care to (or can) lift.
#2 is covered with my main PC backup/raid.  In fact, the way it is now (100% on arcade) is worse since I keep no backup for it.
# 3 is a good point.  I try not to update MAME version too often, but several FE/emulators require a ROM directory rescan before showing new additions.   I think this is manageable though using Remote Desktop Control.

Ultimately, I would love to have the FE and emualtors hosted as well so I could do their configurations once and only have to maintain them in one place.  Is there any resource/link for an example of a network booted MAME yet?

[um3k]

While I don't directly play from a network drive, I do have network setup on the arcade and the partition that has all of the emulation stuff is shared out.  What I do is setup the emulators, front end(s), roms, preview movies, etc all on a partition on my main PC.   Get it exactly the way I want it, then I wrote a little batch file using xxcopy to basically duplicate everything to the arcade share.   The first time this runs, everything gets transferred over, but after that, only the changed/updated files get transferred so it is fairly fast.

This lets me do all the setup from the comfort of my primary PC, but not have to have the PC on or deal with network problems while using the arcade since there is a local copy of everything there.  I also get a side benefit of having a backup copy of everything so I can just reverse the sync to get everything back.   I also run a VNC server on the arcade, in case I need to remotely control the arcade, but I rarely use it.

[CM]

um3k,   Did you run into many issues with emulator DLL registration, directx, etc differences between your main PC and your arcade when you simple mirrored the arcade FE amd emulator program files over (as opposed to being natively installed on the cabinet)?

[um3k]

For things that had a dedicated "install" routine, I performed it locally on the arcade, but then sync'ed from my PC from then on.   In my case, the only things I needed to do an "install" for were MameWAH and GameEX.  All of my emulators are basically "portable" to any directory and store their configuration in config or ini files in their directories.    I did notice that MameWAH stores the "last selected" menu item in its config files so after I sync, the arcade defaults to the last selected items from the PC.  Not a big deal.

One thing that I did set up was a few reverse sync's for things like the nvram and cfg directories, so that local configs and high scores from the arcade are brought back to the PC so they are not overwritten.    There's also some files in GameEX that control the information for "last played" and "number of times played" for the games that I keep from the arcade.

[SavannahLion]

um3k , are you using the freeware or the Pro version of xxcopy? How much better is it than Microsoft junk?

I haven't tried xxcopy before. I've dealt with Microsofts xcopy and their god awful file handling and I just never wanted to screw around with something that was even remotely compatible. Dealing with xcopy was such a bad experience for me, I actually resorted to Perl to get what I wanted done.

[um3k]

I'm using the freeware version.   The main difference between the free and non-free versions is that the freeware version nags you in two places: when you access a remote computer using a UNC path and it warns you when using the /clone option since this deletes files on the destination that are not on the source.  Both of these warnings are passed just by pressing the "any" key, but this prevents you from having an automated / scripted solution.  I am always running it interactively after I make changes anyway, so it doesn't bother me.  You can turn off both of these prompts in the non-freeware version.    I think there are also some advanced features that are only available in the non-free version, but I don't seem to be using any of them.

The batch has a bunch of lines that look like this:
xxcopy /clone /ff G:\Mame \\arcade\G\Mame

Then you get output that looks like this:
C:\WINDOWS>xxcopy /clone /ff G:\Mame \\arcade\G\Mame

XXCOPY  == Freeware ==    Ver 2.93.1  (c)1995-2006 Pixelab, Inc.

\\ARCADE, a server (networked computer) is being accessed.

You have the XXCOPY Freeware version for a stand-alone computer.
If you access the remote disk on a regular basis, you may consider
acquiring a license for XXCOPY-PRO license (for 2 computers).
Press any key to continue . . .

##### WARNING!!! ##### WARNING!!! ##### WARNING!!! ##### WARNING!!! #####
Make sure Source (G:\\Mame) and Destination (\\arcade\G\mame)
are correct.
This command will delete extra files/directories in the destination!
Press Ctrl-C to abort, any other key to begin deleting/copying file(s).
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Directories processed = 177
 Total data in bytes   = 0
 Elapsed time in sec.  =  70.14
 Action speed (MB/min) =   0
 Files examined        = 22922
 Files copied          = 0
 Exit code             = 100 (No files were found to copy)

[SavannahLion]

I dunno. I'm really debating with myself to try out xxcopy. The experience with xcopy was that bad. Not to mention, I might have to set it up as a CRON job (or whatever Windows calls it). I'll just earmark this as something to look into further after I get the living room, bedroom, garage, shed <snip> all done.