It works!
(Click for more moblog photos…)
1) I have Founder’s Breakfast Stout.
2) My MAME cabinet (photo gallery retired) is working again, this time running completely from Compact Flash. I played Bubble Bobble!
As soon as I figure out why the sound card keeps failing (it’ll just cease to work suddenly, for no apparent reason) and fix that, everything will be good. Oh, and once I get all the controls / display stuffs sorted out. But that’s not too difficult.
I just bid on another card on eBay. I think it’s the card failing, so it’s best to replace it.
Expect more on the MAME cabinet soon. There will likely be photos and a write-up in the projects portion of nuxx.net.
Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply after replacing the fuse inside. I guess more than the fuse was bad.
· Diagnosed a motherboard bearing a rather nice AMD Athlon XP 1700+ chip as no longer powering on. I hope I can figure out why, as it was working fine a few months ago. (It’s not the power supply.) This was to be the board in the MAME cabinet. Fortunately I still had my trusty nine year old Abit BH-6, formerly of many different computers including bornslippy.nuxx.net (photo gallery retired). Seems to be working well enough with MAME.
· Ate Kraft Macaroni and Cheese w/ curry powder for dinner.
· Played with Compact Flash to IDE adapters, which work great.
· Installed DOS a few times.
· Ate an enormous salad for lunch which had completely too much blue cheese on it.
· Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB.
· Found that AdvanceMAME runs horribly from flash unless you turn on write caching. (Not sure of why yet.)
you seriously need to put a bigger monitor into that thing.
Yep. Holding off until I find out what is going on with job stuffs, though. If I don’t move, I’ll probably drop the $350 or so on a nice Wells-Gardner with a VGA input.
duuuuuuuude
i had to read this
Also, today I:
· Smoked a power supply…
twice.
Learned that RAMDRIVE.SYS RAMdisks can’t be more than 32MB
Wow, just like disk partitions in DOS 3.2! :)
I figure there has to be some other ramdisk driver available which will let me load all of AdvanceMAME into it. I figure if write caching is the problem, and I don’t care so much about preserving state (although high scores may be nice, but a scripted shutdown could solve this) it’ll be the fastest way to quench the disk contention problem.
It’s maybe a shot in the dark, but have you tried Windows 95a ramdisk?
No, not yet. I was thinking of digging up a copy of 98 OSR2 and just running it’s DOS and seeing. For now my solution is to use a seven year old copy of MAME, a seven year old ROM set (it’s complete for the time), and just have it all run from CF. It seems to work well thus far… Well, except for disk space issues. But if I get a 2GB card I should be all set. I think. :)
By the way, do I know you? If not: Hi. :D
Oops, hi! :)
Yepp, we’ve never met, but we’re both on![[info]](http://stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif)
bdu‘s guestlist for NAMM this year. We seem to share some interests in common; in particular I’m fond of your beer & food posts… ;)
Apologies for not having much recent content on my lj, but it’s been crazy over here lately!
Oh, neat. Yeah, I had to back out of the NAMM thing as I just can’t afford it right now. I’m also thinking of heading out that way on a more permanent basis, so I’m putting all non-essential expenditures on hold.
I added you as well. Believe me, though, I understand how it is. I need to reply to a few emails from people still regarding the MIDIbox SID-NUXX synth stuff and I just keep forgetting. :\ Uggh. Must remember to do that tomorrow.
(And compile a new version of MAME, and establish of DOS or Linux is better for an OS backing a simple kiosk-like MAME install…)