Hard drives in arcade games - are there modern replacements?

MadocOwain

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Hard drives in arcade games - are there modern replacements?

I just got my first arcade game with a hard drive, a Gauntlet: Dark Legacy. Considering the hardware is over 10 years old and has at some point been run at minimum 8 hours a day over an extended period, I'm concerned that the drive will someday crap out.

Due to the age of the drive, I'm sure it's an IDE type, and while for the short term there may be replacements available, I'm thinking longer-term. Does anyone know of a project to replace these drives with solid-state drives or even compact-flash drives?

Thanks!

M.O.
 
IDE drives usually get replaced with CompactFlash cards in IDE adapters. You may need to replace an EEPROM on the board to disable same-drive security in some cases, and there's a few games (PC-based mostly) that have stuff on the drive encrypted against the drive's serial or some other readable feature of the drive.

DL, IIRC, you can just swap the drive.
 
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