> The fact that some games were released from the factory using different size drives > makes it tricky to decide I guess. The worst is the ones that have protection hacked > out to not use dongles though, and that info is rarely in auction listings. That > happens a lot with touchscreen games.
So would the devs not put a hacked board + replacement HD into MAME until something better turned up? Seems worth getting dumps anyway... with the CHD images, you'd think if it really was just writing 0 for gigs the compression could losslessly compress it to virtually nothing anyway - the eqivalent of a note saying "write 0's for 5Gb" instead of actually having 5Gb of zeros in the image!