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Most people know I've been collecting ROMs for quite a while now (7 years or so), and everyone seems to ask where to get them. Of course my answer is, have patience. They mostly come is spurts. You usually find a gold mine for a short period and after a few dozen of those, you can usually build a pretty good collection (they don't last long). Luckly I found another jackpot recently, which pushed my old hard drive to the limit.
Thus I decided to buy a backup Firewire drive for extra space. 250 GB of extra space. Now I can actually sort through my collection since I have the space. Freedom at last! This also allows me to make real backups of my other files. I've also connected it all to our network so Annette can backup her files as well.
One other thing I've wanted to do is consolidate Annette and my MP3 collection. We both have pretty big collections, but not a lot of it overlaps, and we've always been struggling with who's music gets played on the stereo (since iTunes only lets you play one share at a time). Well, now that I have more room, we've put all the music into one central directory. So now both of our MP3 directories in iTunes write to the same spot, and thus we have access to the same music. Eureka! It's not quite perfect (I had originally set it up for us to use the same iTunes library files, but then only one of us could have iTunes open at a time, rather lame), but it works alright for our needs. 14.5 days worth of musical goodness!
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Just wait until you start collecting Laserdisc arcade MPEGs...
Dragon's Lair HELLS YEA
That's why I try to limit myself. I pretty much decided a long time ago to only collect cartrige based ROMs. Thus my collection stops when CD-ROM based games come into play.
The only exception to this is MAME, in which I want everything, which could be a problem. I'm not as worried about the laser disc games as much as I am the hard drive images. Those can be huge!
Yeah I've been stuggling with where to draw the line myself. For awhile I found myself downloading packs for all the various TOSEC DATfiles but then I realized that, well... I really don't care if I can emulate the TI-85 calculator BIOS. Then I decided that I would just keep updating game-based stuff. After downloading some 26GB of N64 ROMs, 10GB of which were overdumps or bad dumps, I suddenly realized that my arcade control panel can't handle the diversity of the N64 controller.
My current policy is: If it has games that can be played with the controls present on my arcade control panel, then I want to keep up-to-date on the ROMs. This handily excludes N64 and PSX/PS2, which have unbelievably huge ROM sets, but does include MAME and the CHD nightmares.
Right now I have so much ROM junk that I can't even keep my
audit page up to date. hah
What kind of drive did you buy?
33.7 days of music. )=
It's a Maxtor drive. The funny thing was there were two versions, one was Mac formatted w/ Firewire connections only, which is all I needed. But the version for Windows had an extra USB 2.0 connector and was unformatted and was $45 more. Weird. Obviously I took the Mac formatted one.