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Running mame and other emulators from network

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Hyperfan:
Thats fantastic mate thanks very much.

drventure:
I've run Mame off a network drive for quite some time now and the only delay I've noticed is in Mala flipping between games (it goes to get the video for each game and that can slow things down).

I don't have any CHD based games, but everything else doesn't seem to have any speed issues whatsoever.

I am running gigabit ethernet, though and mirror/striped raid on my server so that definitely helps.

u_rebelscum:
Gigabit network will be fine for most roms: mame unzips them and stores it in memory, and gigabit is almost as fast as cheap local drives.

Normal CHDs, I wouldn't recommended doing them over network.  Mame does not store the whole CHD in memory, so it has to access it throughout the game.  The exception is the CP3 systems: the CHD is saved to nvram at installation, and the nvram is accessed instead of the CHD after that.  So some CHD games will run okay over the network.

LD-CHDs OTOH, can tax a local 7200 RPM drive and with constantly access; a network drive probably can't handle it.  Other normal CHD are also constant access, and they too might run into speed issues.

So you can do like Deadly & robocopy, or keep the rom sets on the net and the (less often changing) CHDs local.  

(I like the robocopy way; I didn't think of it before Deadly montioned it, but I've used robocopy for things like this and it worked great.)

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