TI Taito Type X HDD: Backing up and protecting my investment

Thread in 'Hardware' started by Brandon Arnold, 9 Aug 2015.

  1. Hi all,

    I'm worried the TGM games are going to be harder to come by in due time, and am thinking about making my collection a little bit, redundant. With TI this could mean backing up my hard drive and dongle, and replacing the originals with a clone. Has anyone done this?

    -Brandon

    P.S. My TI board has begun to give the "press F1 to boot" message, due to the drained CMOS battery. Is it okay for me to just replace it? It seems to be soldered in, according to the Type X article on Arcade Otaku, but otherwise will it affect my Taito license in any way to fiddle with it?
     
  2. Muf

    Muf

    You can't back up the dongle, it contains a smart card. You can desolder the LED on the dongle so that it might not overheat / burn out, but that's only a theory as to why dongles die, so it might not help at all. You can back up the hard drive, using any full-disk imaging solution. I've used dd for windows in the past to make a back-up image. If your dongle dies, you can "phoenix" your Type-X by illegally downloading the game files and putting them on the hard drive. Since you've paid for the game, it's a legal grey area.
     
  3. Hey, thanks--can you use any hard drive regardless of size in the unit and, provided the image is identical, it will work?
     
  4. that depends largely on the full-disk imaging software you use. some will expect the same size drive, because it will attempt to re-write all free space as "blanks" or whatever and if there's a size miss match it will error out.
    Just pic a software that won't care about a size miss match (obviously if your target drive is smaller it can be an issue.
     
  5. I've never seen a CMOS battery soldered into a Type X. I've changed mine a few times now and it's extremely straitforward. With any luck yours will be too.
     
  6. Yeah, the Arcade Otaku article is weird in that sense. I'm not sure if it's wrong or if there are differing setups. Mine was also designed to be removable, and was a CR2032 iirc (not CR2450). There was a rectangular rubber stopper that held it in -- I mention this because we were stupidly trying to lever the battery out with a flathead at first and couldn't find a place to do so, but then found the stopper and were easily able to remove it after that.
     
  7. Much appreciated, colour_thief and Marq.

    Huh. What I get for trusting the internet; I have CR2450s coming in the mail today that probably won't fit. It also says the keyboard has to be PS2, which is false.

    Thanks for the info, guys. It sounds like any hard drive will do--even SATA, assuming Arcade Otaku is right about THAT at least. I'll try to clone the drive in the next week and see what happens.
     
  8. Muf

    Muf

    Type-X2 is SATA, Type-X1 is IDE only.
     

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