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Museum of the Game® & International Arcade Museum® Forums
Over the years I have purchased games — ones originally equipped with mechanical hard drives — converted to compact flash and I've even converted a few to compact flash myself with detailed instructions found here on the forums. However where hard discs can be replaced with compact flash, it doesn't appear that CF can be used in the same way to replace cd drives.
In my case I've got a DDR cabinet that runs program from a CD rom. I've replaced the CD drive twice so far. Now the second is also failing and fails to boot the game about half the time. I reasoned that because ROM data is data (just on a different device to be portable) I'll just replace the CD rom with a flash drive with and a IDE converter and image the files to that. Shouldn't matter the device so long as the files are there (I thought).
Evidently however it's not that simple. I'm not an engineer but could someone explain why it can't easily be done? If laser disc images can be converted to compact flash like Dexter, what's so complicated about having a simple solution to replace a mechanical CD drive? Surely now ancient CD ROMs are going to be failing more and more. To my thinking it doesn't make sense to keep putting obsolete and increasingly more unreliable mechanical equipment in.
So the questions I pose are;
(1) Since the pcb is only reading why can't compact flash be used in place of a CD rom?
(2) what is different about a hard drive in contrast to cd rom drive that doesn't make compact flash plug and play in the case of cd rom replacement whereas it is exactly that easy with a hard disk?
(3) how are others dealing with this problem of failing cd rom drives?
(4) If someone has found solutions or work around (in simple terms please) what equipment and strategy works best?