Too many systems, too many games

[starbuck]

Good morning all,

Do to the large number of games, music, movies etc. that I have,I run no less than 9 external drives. I have tried using cd's or dvd's and find that to be a pain. GameEx is on my computer's main hard drive. Snaps,etc are on another drive. Roms are on drives based on type of system. CD systems are on one, cartridges on another. Music on one, movies on one,etc. Due to the long loading times I only want to hook up the drive for the type games that I will be playing with or working on. This I hope will reduce load times and speed up my older computer.

What I want to do is have all my roms, snaps etc. show up even when my drives are not hooked up. Can I do this with a map file and will this then access the database, snaps etc.

Since the database is set to use No-intro, Goodroms, and TOSEC. Could I access my have and or missing dats and have my lists populated based on these. Would be cool if the have dat games would be green and the missing dat games red. Then when in GameEx I would know what games I still need.

As I add more and more systems (and more games) my number of drives are only going to increase.

A final note if map files are the way to go, can I use map files for movie files, music, karaoke an music videos.

Thanks for a great frontend and community.

[Draco1962]

Have you considered building/running a server? Then it would be a matter of pointing to the drive assignments on the server. I think there are a few that have a server setup from which they are running from HTPC, cabs, desktop/laptop, etc.

[starbuck]

Wouldn't has the first idea how to set it up. Would I need a seperate computer for each of my external drives. Could I run it wireless. Would I still have the problem of speed. I have networked several of my computers. Could my laptop be the server. Would this solve my load time problems. I would think GameEx still needs to load all the drives to load and populate my game lists.

[fRequEnCy]

Map file will help with the loading time of your lists.

Taken from the FAQ:

Q: I have performance issues. Or how do I improve performance?

18. If you have games stored on a remote pc or server and the list takes a while to show up for emulators, consider using a MAP file. GameEx automatically creates map files for your emulators. These are located in the data directory by emulator number. You can simply use these.

[Adultery]

You must have a ton of stuff man! I have 2TB/storage and 500GB/system drive on my cab and I use that to stream everything over the network. I can't imagine all the stuff I'd need to gather to fill all that, but to each his/her own.

[JamminJ]

You must have a ton of stuff man! I have 2TB/storage and 500GB/system drive on my cab and I use that to stream everything over the network. I can't imagine all the stuff I'd need to gather to fill all that, but to each his/her own.

I can understand starbuck's need as I have 8 internal drives no smaller than 1TB and 1 external 3TB. A server only needs 1 cpu and as many externals as you want to connect to it. A laptop would not be a good server as you are limited to the number of externals you can connect. Yes it could be wireless.

[Adultery]

Not true! I have a 16 port usb hub connected to my lappy, so there's 16 EHD's right there. I'm pretty sure you can chain hubs together too.

I have 2 connected to mine right now, mapped as network drives, and both are just internal satas converted to EHD's with $10 kits I bought from Newegg. For me mapped network drive transfers are super fast (12-15 MBPS), whereas shared drives cap out at about 1.5 MBPS.

[JamminJ]

Not true! I have a 16 port usb hub connected to my lappy, so there's 16 EHD's right there. I'm pretty sure you can chain hubs together too.

ahhh..OK, then ignore my 'don't use a laptop as a server'

[Hunk_4TH]

When you guys are saying he should setup a server with his external HDDs do you mean he won't have a problem playing games from the shared HDDs? I always thought streaming games over the network would be very slow. Does this actually work?

[Adultery]

It really depends on how you do it and what games we're talking about here. I stream my media from my cab and it works great, and I transport new stuff from my lappy to my cab. I don't play games off the rempte server really, but if you do it right it can work.

[Hunk_4TH]

Ah ok. I meant like older Mame games,Genesis stuff like that

[Draco1962]

there are quite a number of factors to be considered. First, if he were to build a simple file server (Windows Server 2003 would be fine for this but there are other systems that may be considered), it may require an investment in gigabit NICs and router, but should handle the throughput without much problem over an internal network. Wireless N speeds should be no problem for most. LAN over powerline accessories are also making some modest speed gains as well. Powered USB hubs could handle it as Adultery suggests, but an actual server can provide much more flexibility and scalability. Best thing is to "google" about and look at various alternatives. Most systems end up as a hybrid of one or all of these features, depending on need.

[starbuck]

Thanks everyone for the input.

I am running two internal drives and 7 externals on my pc. I do run into a problem after 5 externals having the main pc dropping the externals. Currtly have 150 different systems emulated and over 12TB of games.I run the movies on my labtop thru my TV. But the games I run thru my PC or cab. When you add in flash games, pc games, music, frets on fire etc. That adds another 6TB of files. Just like the rest of us, I spend alot of time setting up systems, finding snaps etc.

If Gameex reads the map files, will I still have to have the drives connected or will the list populate from the map files without the drives being acessed. With the drives networked, it would be cool if GameEx didn't access them until I decided to play a game.

[Draco1962]

Saw this page and thought of your situation - a few in your collection would probably work well! Will probably consider something similar for an NAS setup (Network Attached Storage) provided the throughput is sufficient. Not sure if any situation will show the lists or snaps without actually accessing the files in any case.

[Adultery]

Well, there's really no reason the artwork for all this couldn't reside on a physical drive, even if the games themselves are hosted elsewhere. Putting your AVI snaps and artwork on a mapped drive may cause GameEx to delay when building your lists, but I'm not sure if that would be the case.

[starbuck]

Did some testing. I have GameEx on my C drive. My roms and media is on another. I pointed my files to the media, Database and the map file. I did not point it to my rom folder. If GameEx can't find the roms it won't show the system. It also starts fine without an error msg. In testing when gameex loads it does not load the settings for the system or the database for the system. It appears GameEx will not load the settings or the database if it can't find the roms, even with the map file.