*grumbles in 27 year old bios*

i think a working floppy drive would cost like, $30? what was the particular type of drive this freaking pc uses called...

but oh if only this could boot from the cd-rom drive...

i don't mind so much that my 486 only can boot from floppies, regular floppy drives are still quite a bit more attainable... and interchangeable (beside that, it can't boot at all rn because of the missing power supply)

but all my other pcs can boot from cd so i just use that

i guess maybe i'll be screwed if booting from cd-rom ever becomes a problem... maybe...

most of these pcs also support usb boot anyway... just the pii and piii don't... not sure about the thinkpad

don't i have another 2.5" ide somewhere i pulled from a broken laptop? not sure of its state...

i think it was 2 or 3 gb, so it's perhaps an upgrade

...feels hilarious calling that an upgrade

i don't think it's quieter though... for me the drive making less noise is typically an upgrade

for better or worse these are usually newer drives... like in the pii system i went with a much less period accurate 40gb over a 10gb because the 40gb made less noise... it is nice having 40gb worth of games on it though

i don't think anyone's made an adapter that not only adapts modern flash storage to old interfaces, but emulates the characteristics of an old hard drive, at least enough to make old software behave... like some kind of buffer... that'd be pretty useful

shit, just let us store our drives as image files on a modern file system, we can choose between the ones we want, "hmm, today i feel like using the windows me drive CLICK"

@onfy isn't that was scsi2sd is?

@noiob maybe? just need an ide version...?

@noiob yeah, that sounds very close to my idea... just that since it's scsi, it's not applicable to most old pcs, or xbox, or ps2...

@onfy both my Xbox and my PS2 take SATA drives, SSDs even, with pretty simple adapters

@noiob it seems like those adapters can have a lot of problems, and the clone ps2 adapters don't have a network interface

that was the idea i had with a "smarter" adapter that doesn't only change the interface

@onfy I don't have a clone adapter, I have a real adapter with the IDE board swapped for one that adapts it to SATA (https://de.aliexpress.com/item/33060033230.html)

though since OPL is the only software that really uses it they do include some patches for the clone adapters, not like most ppl will ever use the network port anyways

@noiob my friend wanted to use that navigator thing they had in japan... it didn't work with their sata hdd because it was too large (48-bit lba!!!!!) and then they tried an sd card adapter that unfortunately was rejected

we aren't sure if the problem was the adapter, card, or lack of ethernet

@noiob ...for that matter, the network port can also be a convenient way of transferring... legally acquired games to the hard drive, instead of needing to physically remove the bloody thing (and apparently you can't use usb)

@onfy FTP is convenient but kinda jank (you can't just use a normal FTP client afaik) and slow. I wouldn't say it's worth the extra money for a genuine network adapter. I have the thing to play Resident Evil: Outbreak on fan servers.

@noiob can't use a normal client ehh?? that's quite interesting, we both tried using ftp on our slims... and couldn't get it to work

@onfy wait what did you try to use FTP on the slim for, they don't have hard drives?

@noiob i don't remember what their goal was... i was trying to help

@onfy you can host games on a SMB1 network drive and supposedly OPL can play them from there but I never got that to work (never tried that hard either I supposed)

@noiob that's the method i use and it works quite well actually, but it's a giant pain in the ass to set up... they were barely able to get it working, with me guiding them in setting up windows xp in a vm

@onfy yeah modern implementations rightfully discourage using SMBv1

if you just wanna play pirated games the memcard-sd adapters that cropped up recently are probably the most convenient solution

@noiob they're interested in but cautious about the mx adapter, because it still seems to have weird issues in places

im not concerned that much myself, i'll just ride out smb

@noiob it also seems like the sd adapter is only 50% faster than usb

@onfy is that not enough?

@noiob well, it's still slower than the optical drive!

@onfy might be fast enough for games to run though, I know USB 1.1 is not that much too slow

@onfy thing is it's by far the cheapest and easiest option