Area 51: Site 4 Compact Flash Issue

[KI4SWY]

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

let me correct you & myself.

1) there is a bio chip, its U1 surface mount.
2) there is no copy protection in the bios, so any HDD will work.
3) again try an external disk duplicator, as the game is only occupies the first 2.39gb of the drive, so as long as the first 3gb is copied. it should work.

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[pun84]

I was able to transfer the image from the working 40GB IDE drive to a 7.0GB IDE.

However I couldn't get it to work when I moved the 7.0GB image to the 7.45GB compact flash card.. I get errors something like Bad home file or bad boot file/block.. hrm.

So.. SD cards work eh?

 

[JohnB]

KI4SWY I am starting to believe you may be right in some fashion, that compact flash just doesnt work, whether it is security chip/software related or incompatible hardware related. In any fashion that has worked for every game I have tried, including games much older than site4, chdman and cf cards have worked with the ide->cf adapter. This game just does not.

 

[priglmeier]

HD to CF

Here is the article on my site about compact flash:

http://www.priglmeier.com/arcade_projects/hd2compact_flash.html

 

[pun84]

Yeah, when I re-did my A51/Maxforce combo I got the 3 strikes thing and then working behavior just like in your article..

However with the A51 Site4 it doesn't reboot itself and then work. It just doesn't detect properly at all. The powering on the CF before the board thing sounds like an interesting idea.. ill try it out!

 

[pun84]

One of the errors I get is.. "Error reading boot file"

 

[pun84]

There's a way, just not compact flash. SD works great

What kind of SD card do you have?

My compact flash cards are are 8GB @ 30MB/s
I have a Micro SD HC sdc2 16GB @ 2MB/s

The SD card looks wayyyyyyyy slower... is this the key... the newer cf cards are too fast for old motherboards?