Best place to 'keep' games and emulators?

[MrSlippery]

Hello,

This question is not directly related to LaunchBox and is more of a general question regarding emulation.

I do not have many ROMs, but I also do not have a lot of space on my hard drive, either. I have an external hard drive, though. 

Is it best (if one wants to keep clutter low on their internal hard drive) to store ROMs and such on an external hard drive? And as for emulators, can those also be run from an external hard drive, or is it better for those to be 'local?'

I was thinking that maybe I could store the games I'm not currently playing onto an external hard drive and then simply copy the file I want to play over to my internal hard drive and play it locally. Then, when finished, swap it out for a different game.

Also, regarding LaunchBox, is this how everyone does it? Using an external hard drive to store ROMs?

Thanks!

[Pale Ale]

"I do not have many ROMs" is subjective 😉, but for your scenario it sounds like you should just leave them on the external. I think it mostly depends on the systems you're into. If your favorite systems are NES and Gameboy, you could easily store a complete collection on a very small internal drive. The point of LaunchBox is to build a beautiful looking library, so if you don't keep the external drive plugged in, it will be a library of dead links. Another option you might want to consider is installing LaunchBox itself to the external drive, and just make that your "gaming drive" and only play while it's plugged in.

e.g. if your external is drive E- you'd just run E:\LaunchBox\Launchbox.exe and put all your games in E:\LaunchBox\Games

Everything would be clean and contained in the LaunchBox folder.

[MrSlippery]

Hello Pale Ale (my favorite kind of beer, by the way),

Thank you for that. Yes, I can totally understand just keeping small ROM files on my internal HDD. However, from what I have seen, some ROMs can be 15+ GBs. And since, as you say, Launchbox is a way for people to show off their libraries, I imagine some people have many (hundreds perhaps) of 2~3 GB (or higher) files. Keeping them all on the internal HDD, especially when you're only ever really going to play a small fraction of the ROMs seems crazy to me. Of course, that is just me, and if I had the space I could definitely understand wanting to have everything there to show off. 

My laptop has 300GB of space on the C drive and ~1TB on the D drive. I thought, when I bought this thing, that it would be enough and that there was no way I could ever need more space. Well, somehow, even without ROMs, I have managed to take up a rather large chunk of that disc space! Perhaps it is all of my Steam games...

I like your idea of running Launchbox from an external HDD, though. It is nice to know that is an option. I am not much of a computer person, but I don't know if certain programs/software packages would perform better when on an internal HDD (or even if it makes a difference. A cursory query seems to indicate that it does, but I don't know to what extent/degree). I will look at purchasing an external HDD that would be dedicated to this. I imagine 2TB would be more than enough.

Thanks again for the help! 

 

Edited December 27, 2022 by MrSlippery

[TopGunBass]

I have everything on my internal drive. It is dedicated for my arcade so I'm fine keeping it there. Definitely go the external drive route if you want to keep your laptop clean. Just put launchbox on the externally and do it all from there. The only downside would be the time it takes to launch a game. It could be faster if it was on the internal drive. 

[Pale Ale]

9 hours ago, MrSlippery said:

 

I like your idea of running Launchbox from an external HDD, though. It is nice to know that is an option. I am not much of a computer person, but I don't know if certain programs/software packages would perform better when on an internal HDD (or even if it makes a difference. A cursory query seems to indicate that it does, but I don't know to what extent/degree). I will look at purchasing an external HDD that would be dedicated to this. I imagine 2TB would be more than enough.

 

It's rather typical since the advent of SSDs to see smaller drives (the trade-off being much better speed). If you can justify the extra cost for yourself, an external SSD would be super fast, particularly for the kind of data generated by LaunchBox (thousands of small image files, sound files, etc. can be harder on a drive in some ways than one giant file). Check out the Crucial X8 series for what might be the best price/performance ratio (at the time of this post of course!).