Possible to run games off an iPod?

If, say, I wanted to run Half Life 2 off my iPod so I don't have to keep it on my system, would I be able to run it off my iPod after installing the game using my computer? How would this affect in-game performance?

 

Ingame performance probably take a hit, since iPods use 3600RPM drives, and the USB host would slow it down even more. It is possible though.

 

I can run Crysis maxed out at 320x240 on my iPod.

 

If you can use the Ipod as a hot swappable hard drive, then yes, Steam fully supports this. Just move your ENTIRE steam folder to anywhere on the ipod granted you have enough space, and click steam.exe from the steam folder on the iPod and it should start up as normal. If you have alot of ram, the game might take a little longer to start up, but you shouldn't notice any drop in framerate, It might take longer to load the next levels, but that's about it.

 

In game performance might not get hit but loading time will. The game needs to be cached to your RAM first.

 

Yeah I don't really care for load times, I just dont understand why in-game performance would drop once all textures/maps are loaded and ready to go. I will give it a try then

Rofl.

 

Btw, I have done this with my Zune before

The screen broke and I used the XP registry hack to use it as a portable hard drive, and dragged N' dropped steam onto it, all of the games worked fine, Performance was exactly the same, but maps took like 4x longer to load..

 

i know its been done with oblivion, but loading times are terrible. It should work though.

 

Stick with running retro games if you want to carry around games on an ipod/thumb drive. Starcraft, Fallout 2, and Geometry Wars work fine playing from my Sansa View (basically an ipod alternative, I'll save you the apple bashing and leave it at that), and you could probably play games like warcraft 3 and half life 1 from thumb drives/etc... as well.

Have you looked at external hard drives? What about just finding something else to store on the ipod to save HD space?

 

It is entirely possible to do this, as the ipod can be used as an external drive.

As people have stated loading times will be longer.

You might want to take into consideration that ipod hard drives arent designed to be constantly spinning. When playing songs on the old pod, it spins up the disk, then transfers the upcoming songs into its RAM. Then stops the hard disk.

Using it to run a game from will probably have it spinning up more than it was designed to, resulting in a smaller lifespan. Apple recommend that you do not use the ipod as a boot disk because of this problem.

Not sure if it will have much effect if any at all, but just something to bear in mind.

 

Let me clear up my intentions, so that I am not restricted to an iPod.

I am trying to install a few (4-5) old games and a couple newer ones (Bioshock, HL2, and HL2 episodes once I purchase the episode pack). However, these games take up about 50GB of HD space and I have noticed my computer has taken a huge hit in boot-up time when I began to install some of them so they had to be removed. I do not mind if registry files and shortcuts are installed on my system, I simply need the bulk of the games (textures, movies, etc) to be located somewhere else that I can just plug in and play as if it it was on the same HD.

Would a proper external HD be the solution? Let's say, one running at 7200RPM? I am thinking of whipping out some more cash to get a good 80GB HD from new egg I can carry around with an eSATA connection if possible.