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    Orc in the Playground
     
    Texas Jedi's Avatar

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    Default Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    I have a few games on 1.44 floppy drives and I can get an external floppy drive reader for my laptop. I was wondering if there is a way that I can install and play those games on my flash drive. I have an 8 gig sandisk floppy and I would think that all of the games combined would be well less than a gig.

    The games are Master of Magic, and Master of Orion, Might and Magic World of Xeen, and several others.

    The other question is if I install them onto my flashdrive does that mean I could play them anywhere?
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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Kobold

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    Default Re: Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    This is more a question of systems than of flash drives. Whether or not they'll run off the flash drive depends on your operating system. Win XP was notoriously bad at running old games and Vista is even worse. Some of the games will work some will not.

    What I suggest is installing dosbox on your flash drive and running the games through that. Dosbox is a dos emulator. If you can get that running on the flash drive and you copy the games to the flash drive you'll be able to play them all.

    And if you want to be really l33t about it you can get dosbox for other operating systems too. Keep a copy of windows, mac, and linux dosbox on one flash drive so you can play your games on *any* system. Hell, I even play old games on my XBox with dosbox.

    The only part I'm unsure about is if dosbox will run off the flash disk or if you'll have to install it each time. Worst case you can leave the installer on the drive and run that on each new machine you get to.
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  3. - Top - End - #3
    Orc in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    That is a good idea. I guess I will have to do that.
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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Erloas's Avatar

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    Default Re: Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    If a game will play off of a flash drive generally has to do with what the program does durning install. Many games write information to the registry durning installation and without that information the game won't run, so if that is the case you would be able to install to the flash drive and run on the same computer so long as your flash drive is always the same drive letter, but you wouldn't be able to run on any other systems.

    If the games are really old then the are going to be before the windows registry in which case they should install and run fine off of a flash drive. That is of course assuming the game will run on the system at all (see previous poster) and doesn't have much to do with the flash drive. The only problem with putting certain games on a flash drive is that they are relatively slow for transfer rates so a game might run very sluggishly on a flash drive whenever it has to load. I don't see that being an issue if the games are really old, but it could be even on just fairly old games.

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    Titan in the Playground
     
    PaladinGuy

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    Default Re: Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    Quote Originally Posted by Erloas View Post
    The only problem with putting certain games on a flash drive is that they are relatively slow for transfer rates so a game might run very sluggishly on a flash drive whenever it has to load. I don't see that being an issue if the games are really old, but it could be even on just fairly old games.
    I doubt that a multi-gigabyte flash drive has read/write speeds of less than 1.44 megabytes/second... the maximum speed of USB 2.0 is 480 megabits/second, which is roughly equal to 60 megabytes/second, or over 30 3.5" floppies per second. He'll have no issues with speed. Especially since the computer can fit over a hundred copies of the entire game onto the RAM.

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    Ettin in the Playground
     
    Erloas's Avatar

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    Default Re: Question to those more knowledgable about Flash Drives

    Well it depends if the games are designed to be installed from floppy disks or played from them. Given in many cases anything installing from floppy disks was limited to maybe around 40mb before the disk count got too high, and 40mbs worth of files generally only takes a few seconds to transfer to most flash drives. Also while the USB 2.0 limit is 480mbps, very few, if any, USB flash drives are even close to that maximum. Also flash drives can vary a lot in speed, and while it can be assumed that an 8GB flash drive is pretty new and probably fairly fast there are a lot of cheap flash drives that are really slow, since they use the cheapest chips they can find to keep prices down.

    I wouldn't forsee the flash drive as being a limiting factor, I was just bringing up the point, because it might become relivent if someone decides to install some games that are 3-5 years old on them instead of games that are 10 years old.

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