Re: Hardware Follies: Defeated by the Disk

On Mon, 26 May 2025 16:34:57 +0200, H1M3M <wipnoah@gmail.com> wrote:

With regards to the HDD, I ended using a CF to ide adapter and
industrial cards. It's nice being able to switch between Windows 95, 98
and even japanese windows for playing touhou games.

I have one of those for my old Win95-era laptop. I still think its
really neat being able to switch between operating systems simply by
yanking the card and slotting in a new one. It's like an OS cartridge!

I've considered -but largely resisted- doing something similar with
the Project98 box because... well, for a variety of reasons. Capacity
is the biggest issue, of course. As mentioned, I'm using the
hard-drives to store the CD-ROM images for the various games, and even
128GB cards start feeling a bit cramped. But, as importantly, I don't
think this would help with the compatibility issue that are holding me
back. Plus, while it's probably less of a problem now, I have bad
memories of data-loss because read/write limits to the flash memory
(although it's unlikely I'd actually encounter them if used as a drive
just to store CD-ROM images).

With the added bonus
of being able to copy files to the card from my main PC, since my retro
build lacks USB ports.

Argh, isn't that one a bitch? The Project98 has a /single/ USB port,
but it's USB 1.1, so 12Mbps is the absolute max... and when copying
hundred-megabyte files, that's pretty damn slow. Still, it's faster
than the alternative: burning to CD-RW or using zip disks. ;-)
Unsurprisingly, the motherboard also lacks built-in networking, and
I've already allocated every expansion slot to other cards.