Area 51: Site 4 Compact Flash Issue

Txny Mxnrxe

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I am in the process of trying to upgrade my Site 4 drive to a compact flash card. According to chdman the chd I have is a good version. The board works fine with the hard drive but when I try to boot it using the compact flash drive it gets to the hard drive check it say waiting for hard drive..... then it reboots itself. I dont know where to start checking what the problem is.
 
Do you have a working hard drive / good image for it now?

If so, did you take that working image from your hard drive and use it to build your CF image? Or did you go with a file from MAME?

Have you tried a different CF drive?
 
I decided to look that up. Guy was posting a guide on how he made and exchanged his hard drive to a compact flash for his Gauntlet Legends.

He mentioned copying the chdman.exe to the hard drive before he cloned it to the compact flash drive. Maybe thats the issue? There may also be an issue with the brand or speed of the card.

He also mentioned the game would error upon start up for 30 seconds and then begin playing. Gave him the 3 clicks for hard drive failure and everything, but he said it will eventually work. It just may do this everytime you boot it up.
 
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try the latest chdman.exe; make sure that you're using that CHDMAN to suck up the contents from your hard drive rather than using one from MAME.

Try a different cf card. That's about all I can suggest.
 
So far I have only used a chd from mame but I do have a good hard drive to try. I have heard about the error message for a little bit then it works but I have let it go on for a few minutes and still have the same results
 
If you have a good working hard drive then you absolutely should capture the image from that using chdman and then use chdman to write the copy to the CF drive.
 
Be sure you are using a CF card that's at least twice the size of the CHD image.

That's the kicker right there.....

If the CHD was taken from a 10GB drive, then it expects to place the image on a 10GB drive or slightly bigger. So even though the "image" itself may be smaller than 10GB, the boot sector is going to write the addresses as if it were on a 10GB drive. Make any sense?
(and I just used the figure of 10GB as an example)

I have little experience with the chdman stuff, but it seems you need to know what size drive the image came from before you can dump it to a CF card. If the image was taken from a 2GB, no problem. But if it was taken from say a replacement 30GB drive, then there might be a problem.
 
I will try to dump it from my drive later tonight. When I look at the chd info it says the logical size is something like 2.6GB with a compressed size around 700MB and the card I am using is an 8GB so that should be alright I assume.
 
I have one of those that works for my site 4 but its not as quick as the hard drive and there is slow downs in the game. The best thing to do is get a brand new 30 gig western digital hard drive those things last for ever. It was the original hard drives that were braking down!
 
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It's true, you could possibly place it in a better suited hard drive that is supported by IDE. Unless you can find a SATA to IDE converter that would not cause issues.
 
Anyone get this to work? I am having trouble myself... I have tried DD (linux) and CHDMAN... my image works on multiple ide hard drives.. but not the compact flash.. pretty weird..

Maybe some sort of jumper/bios/rom chip upgrade is needed?

Its a bit strange that I can get compact flash to work with a51/maxforce combo but not a51 site 4 :/
 
Then how is it possible people are selling compact flash kits for SITE 4 ?
 
Either use a faster CF card or look for a WDOG jumper on the board and jumper it if there is one.
 
SD card as in one of these ?

sd-cf-adapter-card.jpg


Right now I am using SanDisk Ultra Compact Flash.. 30MB/s 8GB and also have tried 16GB, thats not fast enough? :)


I don't see a WDOG jumper.. but on the jamma side of the board I see J6 labeled RESET with a header 2 pin going to the cpu side of the board.. is that it?

thanks
 
if you have an external disk duplicator, i have had success is imaging a 20gb drive to a smaller 4gb drive, and then verifying the 4gb drive still works on the machine, and then imaging the 4gb to the CF.

also, some arcade boards don't like booting from anything but certain type drives (and you have to find a custom bios (like KI2)).
 
there is no bios chip on the site 4 pcb, and many different brand hd clones have been made for it. So this information or opinion rather, is irrelevant to the conversation
 
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