A dedicated emulation system

[Harrison]

If you wanted to hold the compete rom sets for each you mean?

If you were not going to store the CD based games then a 200GB HD would be enough for those 4 systems. However if you did want to have every Amiga game then you would be looking at more as the full Amiga set with all CDTV, CD32 and other Amiga CDs will easily fill 300GB. Without the CD based games 200GB HD would be fine.

The best place to have a look to get an idea of the HD space needed for different rom sets is pleasuredome.org.uk as they list the complete sets.

The other issue is that once you get into emulation and have a few full sets, then you will want more. N64 for example which fills roughly 7 DVDs or 22GB. Or CD based games systems, which fill a lot more.

[Submeg]

Woa, thats a lot of stuff. How expensive are large HDs these days? We should have a thread for part costs somewhere...

[Harrison]

250GB HD is about £40-50 at the moment I think. Seagate is probably the best make to go for, although Maxtor have always been good for me.

[Submeg]

Thats an alright price, hope they are around that mark down here

[Harrison]

If you are building a new system then try to go for SATA Harddrives as they save a lot of hassle. No jumper settings are correct positions needed on any IDE cables. You just connect the SATA cable and power to the drive and it works.

[Submeg]

I just remembered that my sis is getting a laptop so the comp that used to in her room is going to replace the 500 MHz one that is sitting in the study collecting dust. But that one is only 850 Mhz, so I'll have to look into buying a new comp

[Harrison]

850MHz is fast enough for most emulation though and would lend itself well to MAME and other 8-bit and 16-bit system emulators. Running Windows 2000 on a PC of that speed would be best as XP would use up too many system resources.

It would probably struggle with some of the more recent 3D based systems, and the more recent games MAME supports, but everything else would work fine.