Game Systems on Compact Flash

Came across an interesting web page the other day where this guy is using compact flash to replace disk drives in video gaming consoles. His primary motivation is that commercial video gaming consoles find themselves in some of the least hospitable retail environments. With an inexpensive CF to IDE adaptor, a "suitably large" CF card, a few keystrokes all of those nagging Newtonian reliability issues associated with mechanical disk drives are a thing of the past.

It seems to me that retail environments are far from the least hospitable environments that embedded computers are utilized. But the guy does have a point to make about the ease and benefit of adapting an application from disk to flash. Checking the web sites of several flash vendors, I see 4GB CF cards are readily available. These devices are suitably large enough for many applications.

- Jim