portable space empires???

[wildcowboy]

Just wondering if anyone has recommendations for a portable external hard drive. The ones Ive seen all operate at 5400rpm. Is this sufficient to run SE directly from it? Any opinions and personal exp. welcome.

Thanks,
CB

[DarkHorse]

Buy.com

I just bought this one; 7200rpm USB 2.0 etc, for a pretty reasonable price.

[Suicide Junkie]

Heck, you could use a USB key.

Even a 128meg key is enough if you trim down the data files...
Delete the 800x600 or 1024x768 system pictures, whichever you won't be using. And downgrade the ones you will be using to have fewer colours and save more space.

[Fyron]

External hdds are usually a rip-off. It is generally cheaper to buy a IDE drive (on sale all the time too) and an enclosure (pay more than $20 for a good aluminum one and you are getting ripped off).

$100 is sort of approaching what you could pay for a 250 gb IDE drive + enclosure though, and might be worth it for you.

SJ:
I dunno if you could fit it on 128 MB. Dogscoff had a hell of a time getting it to fit on just a 700 MB CD.

Another possibility is to mod the SystemTypes.txt file so that all systems use the same image. Won't help much with PBW, but fine for single player.

SE3, however, is fairly portable. It's install size is only a few MBs. But you might need to activate the registration on every machine you run it on... Could probably export the registry keys for that to make it faster though.

[wildcowboy]

Im looking at a 100GB simpletech that is up for $100. Dark Horse, Ive seen nothing but good things about the MyBook but its much larger dimensions than what Im searching for. Im looking for something truly pocket size. I thought of the 1GB jump drive but I need something that I can store several GB's of other data on for work and such. I guess what it comes down to is whether 5400 rpm is enought o run the game directly from the drive. As for the file size on my PC for the game Im sitting at 669MB for the whole deal with AT's Star Trek mod. Thanks for the opinions guys and tell me what you think. I forgot why I liked this site so much when I lurked around several years ago.

CB

[bearclaw]

Later this month I'm due to buy a replacement for my aging Palm m500. I'll be buying a Palm LiveDrive. It has 4 Gb onboard memory and I'll be purchasing a 2 Gb SD card with it. LiveDrives can also function as a USB drive so my intention is to have SEIV installed on that and run games off it.

When I get it all together, I'll try to remember to post it's performance.

[Fyron]

100 GB for $100? Yikes! Don't throw money away like that. Watch the deal sites til the next time a 160 GB is up for ~$40, and an enclosure is under 20. Lots of companies make good enclosures that are not much larger than the hdd itself.

Of course, if you want truly pocket sized, you want a notebook ide drive and a 2.5 inch enclosure.

[geoschmo]

Imperator Fyron said:
SJ:
I dunno if you could fit it on 128 MB. Dogscoff had a hell of a time getting it to fit on just a 700 MB CD.

128 would be a tight squeze, but you might be able to do it. A clean install should be fairly easy to fit it on a 256MB flash drive. IIRC Dogscoff was trying to load it with lots of extra shipsets and his favorite mods.

[Suicide Junkie]

Oh it was, but 128 was all that was available way back when.

Nowadays, you could grab a 1gig stick for a couple bucks and pile the imagepacks and a couple of mods onto it.


Oooh, what about a bootable linux with wine on it?
Insert Disk, Power On, Play SE4. Power Off, Poof.
Good on CDRW too.

[Fyron]

Of course, it's probably not a good idea to run SE4 off of a USB flash drive anyways; all those temp file writes are sure to kill it. With flash getting cheap these days, it might be worth it though. Just make sure to back up your savegames from time to time.