Arcade 1UP cabinets

[Harrison]

OK. Cool.

[Demon Cleaner]

I just cloned the SD with Win32 Disk Imager and that worked fine Took 3.5 hours though.

[Harrison]

That's good. That's a long time though. I suppose the number of small files would slow it down greatly.

[Harrison]

I was thinking it might be good to consider making SD card images we could store on the server for members to use. And also a good backup for ourselves.

I keep saying it, but with the state of social media these days and the difficulty for many to find and setup rom sets and builds for the ever increasing number of emulation handhelds, and things like RetroPie, having configured SD card images that can just be downloaded and written to SD card would be a great solution.

Would need to be kept under the radar and not openly advertised though. Just offered to specific people looking that we trust.

One area I don't see often, or all the information in one place, is a rom building discussion place since the demise of places like Bitgamer and Pleasuredome, for setting up and building rom sets for emulation. I would really like to try and get that going somehow. That could be a direction to try and get more activity back on these forums and wouldn't need too much work or time dedicated to the site to initiate to get interest from new members or returning old ones. Will have a think about this over Christmas.

I still want at some point to create a centralised site directory dedicated to emulators to bring all the information scattered all over the internet into one central place.

[Demon Cleaner]

The image I created from my SD card is 973.340.672 KB.

The problem with different setups is that you have to create one for each size, 32MB, 64MB, 128MB aso. Which is again a lot of work. Which games to include? For some smaller systems you can just add everything, but bigger ones? You will f.ex. notice that on my SD card there's a lot of sports and racing games, my favorite category when it comes to retro, but some people might not find the game they are searching for, but you cannot start creating different games setups, that would be huge.

[Harrison]

I had the idea of created themed images, with busy one genre of games across multiple emulated systems, so just fighting games or shmups f.ex. not sure anyone done that yet. Or even single games studios, so all Sega, Nintendo or Square Enix.

I got that idea from playing this 1upArcade cabinet where the included roms were only in thy same genre and theme as the cabinet.

[J T]

Themed images does sound like a good idea.

Not knowing how long it takes to build / do, what about a periodic thing like a 'collection choice for this month'?

[Demon Cleaner]

You have to create playlists. In LaunchBox f.ex. I can just create a playlist let's say with soccer games, and all the games that include the soccer genre in their metadata will automatically be included. Sadly enough not every single game out of 30.000 has the correct metadata.

- - - Updated - - -

Yesterday I wanted to write my image back to my new SanDisk Ultra microSDXC 1TB card. After around 13% it failed, as it was already a bit later I didn't run it again, wanted to start then this morning. So far so good.

Then I switched to TV, leaving the PC on for later, and we watched the football game. After the game I switched back and I had a blue screen. Wtf? So I restarted the PC, I was checking what could have caused it, 3 minutes later, bam, blue screen again. I then detached all USB devices, rebooted, and after that it was working fine. Still wondering why it happened but got the idea that it might be hardware related (Wdf01000.sys)

This morning I wanted to start my copy again, 2 minutes later, blue screen. Ok, now I knew. Something is wrong with the card reader or the card itself. I removed the card reader and it was fricking hot. I put another SD card in the reader and it was still working fine after 10 minutes, reader was cool. I took another reader, 2 minutes later, blue screen. I removed the SD and almost burnt my fingers.

At least I will get it replaced, mainly thanks to you Dave Because I ordered the card 1 month ago and it was still wrapped, it was meant for the Loki Max, which will probably arrive in the first month of 2023. Then only I would have noticed that it is defective but would not have been eligible for a replacement anymore because the last date for returning it back was the 31st of January.

Definitely tells you not to order stuff in advance!!

[Demon Cleaner]

Amazon send me already a new SD card although I did not even send mine back. I will only send it this morning together with yours.

[Harrison]

I never would have thought an SD card could have such issues. I've never encountered them getting hot or causing a complete system crash. Do you know what the exact system errors were?

It might be worth seeing if there is a way to fully test new cards when we buy them.

As you mentioned, I also tend to buy extra SD cards in advance. I got a few 128GB and 256GB cards earlier in the year when they were in offer in Amazon. They are all still sealed so never used. I just assume they will work when needed. I only need them that size or even smaller for things like cameras and handheld systems most of the time so keep a few spare.

But larger capacity cards are still more expansive, so if there is some way to fully test them when purchased works be good. I will have a look about. I'm sure there was a Lonux tool that could fully test them. And if so a small Linux distro on a memorystick would be all that's needed. That could bypass Windows and just boot into Linux for small overhead and no BSOD issues.

In fact I'm going to look into this properly. If we could find a small USB stick installable Linux that has SD card testing, duplication and image making built in that could be very handy. I will let you know what I find.

For smaller capacity cards it's not really such an issue though if a card is faulty as they don't cost much these days and are nearly throw away items when they fail. Anything up to 256GB is now fairly cheap. Even brands like Sandisk can be picked up for under £20. But 512GB cards are around £50 for a decent make, and 1TB cards are still around £100 or more which is still quite a bit to lose. So testing and getting them replaced soon after purchase would be good to start doing.