Maybe I’m just a young whipper snapper but I don’t get why people would want cartridges when freely copying the files to the main drive is an option since this would only work with DRM-free games. Cartridges were historically used instead of floppy disks or optical disks for DRM as you can make them basically impossible to duplicate. Even now the only reason Nintendo still sells cartridges is to allow the same game to be played in different devices with different logged in accounts while ensuring there is only one copy available between them.
And so with that in mind the basic idea is that you grab DRM free games (from stores like GOG), and pop them onto SD Cards to turn them into cartridges that Kazeta will detect.
So now instead of storing games on the computer itself, you have to go out of your way to put them on individual SD cards?
Also, is it strictly one game per SD card? That would be pretty wasteful of the available space for smaller games.
I noticed a lot of non-technical people using ChimeraOS/SteamOS getting lost in Steam’s complex menu structure and struggling with basic things like launching and closing games
I feel like someone who’s so nontechnical they can’t even figure out Steam’s UI, which is developed by a massive company with dedicated UX engineers and comprehensive QA for all their software, would probably also not be able to figure out installing a Linux OS, especially one that doesn’t boot into a normal GUI by default. It also assumes they will have a dedicated computer just for console style gaming, which nontechnical users probably wouldn’t bother with. Unless they plan on selling devices with their OS preinstalled as dedicated game consoles?
Also, you still have to interact with GOG to get the games. And also be able to find the app data direcrory GOG downloads games to in order to put them onto an SD card.
This also directly contradicts a quote later in the article: “Kazeta is definitely not for everyone. It requires a bit of work to get started”
I became disenchanted with digital storefronts and have come back around to appreciating physical media: game cartridges, CDs, DVDs
I have gotten more and more into collecting old physical games and systems and found them to be a much more pleasant experience than what modern gaming offers
Fair enough if you just want physical media in general, but I feel like people collecting physical media would specifically want ones branded by the company and not generic SD cards.
I have become more and more concerned with preserving my digital game collection for play in the future.
Bur there’s things in between digital storefronts and physical read-only media. Why not just have a special directory on the desktop that autodetects games copied into it? I assume that’s basically what happens when you insert an SD card with a game on it.
If you want to keep games atomic and prevent corruption of the directory structure, why not just support game directories in the form of tar or zip files and automatically mount them as a virtual filesystem?
keeping your games untouched and preserved forever
Don’t flash based storage put your data at risk of corruption if you leave it unpowered for too long? Having the games on the SSD you have powered every day sounds like it would be safer.
Though at least the flash’s write cycle limit wouldn’t matter with read only cards.
It’s a cute idea, but seems like it is just going to generate a bunch of e-waste.
It isn’t as whimsical I guess, but a barcode scanner, NFC tags, or just picking a game from a menu would be my preference. I have actual retro systems, if I want to walk across the room to switch games.
Yeah my ideal scenario is something NFC based. I have a bunch of games across a bunch of launchers and emulators and I always get the ADHD issue where I forget I have certain games if I don’t see them. Little NFC cards with game box art printed to it would be amazing for this.
Kazeta is Czech for casette. The Waterloo-based developer is Canadian but has a Czech name (Alesh Slovak / Aleš Slovák) and knows basic Czech so probably a descendant of Czechoslovak emmigrants.
But like, where do I download all my games from?
GOG. The games you buy there are DRM free and are actually yours. You can even backup then in a external HD, personal server, etc.
So I guess you could pick one, install inside a SD Card and it would be like a Switch card. Cool idea.
other device
Kind of like an open-source Evercade, then?
Why would I not want the savegames on the same card as the game? For me that doesn’t make sense.
Might be to prevent the SD card from running out of write cycles?
Once upon a time I owned a GameCube memory card, specifically so that I could have my own save progression when visiting my friend’s house (who actually owned the GameCube and games). That may not really apply anymore?
On another note though, making the sd card read only means it will last significantly longer. Flash storage (like SD cards) have limited write cycles, so this preserves the games themselves while leaving the much smaller save files to be written somewhere else where they’re easier to back up.
Since you brought it up, what about bit rot, which happens regardless of writes?
Bit rot happens on much longer time scales (like 10+ years), and can happen regardless of use. Most storage media has this as an issue though, so that’s why it’s always good to have backups.
Save games probably wouldn’t have a huge effect on write endurance, but certainly in some uses that write constantly like a dashcam, it could potentially destroy the flash in a matter of months. There are endurance sd cards for this kind of application, but they usually come in smaller sizes, and I’ve still had them fail eventually.
I think I’ve solved the problem of computer gaming.
It’s emulating on a gaming laptop with save data automatically backed up to MEGA.
How do you do that? If you don’t mind me asking.
No problem.
The hardest part is getting a controller working. I’m not sure what OS you have, but getting a bluetooth controller working properly on Linux can be hit or miss. If you’re on Windows with a USB controller or one with a dongle, it should be much easier. I’m sorry I can’t give direct advice because it will depend on your setup.
Otherwise, just download emulators for the consoles you want, download the games for free at vimm.net, then you’re off to the races. You may have to change some settings, but it shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re willing to look at them and experiment a bit as needed.
You can download the MEGAsync program and go through the process of syncing the folders that hold game saves to an online backup. It’s pretty intuitive to follow the program. You will need to look up where each emulator holds its save data though, because it’s not really standardized.
To get you started, these are some emulators that I recommend with large libraries and stable support:
-PCSX2 for PS2
-Dolphin for Gamecube
-Torzu for Switch
-mGBA for Gameboy Advance
-Duckstation for PS1
-PPSSPP for PSP
There are of course others for different consoles, and even multiple emulators for the same console. Don’t get too hung up on doing things perfectly the first time. Try to get some experience and you’ll see what works for you and what doesn’t.
Start small and work your way up.
this is the peak of “cool but functionally useless”
i unironically love it
I’d say it is cool but very expensive. One SD Card for each game would not be cheap, specially if the game is big, like 100gb or more.
So… a Linux desktop with slots for all the retro games, innit?
I was kicking around the idea of building an arcade machine at home and this might just be the one…
Now the real question - can you play old school platformers on it with split second precision that doesnt get interrupted by random shit on the OS? Even Nintendo’s SNES Classic was horseshit for games like Megaman. Or maybe I just suck now.
Software based emulators always have a bit of input latency. If you want the native experience you need an FPGA system.
Honestly I love the idea. I wonder if they’re planning on the obvious next step of adding a media player that will work similarly, turn it on with a disc or SD card inserted and it’ll play the DVD or music
I mean I pretty much do the same thing with my mister and NFC card readers.
So I need an SD card for every game?
You can buy used cards up to 512MB very cheaply, I assume. That’s enough for almost all pre-CD games.
If I remember right, flash memory is basically based on static electricity and those cheap SD cards might self-wipe after a couple years being unplugged
but maybe not lol
Mostly just a small-ish info dump in the event it helps anyone. All flash and nand media can self-wipe if not used for a couple of years (though nand can last longer but may start to slow down to SATA and slower). Even if in an active PC, the parts that are only read but not written this can happen. Learned that from some episodes of “Security Now” podcast and personally saw it happen with a PC I was trying to fix for someone. On the show one of the hosts has a commercal program called “SpinRite” that was made to help with HDDs that have non-moter/actuator issues revive sectors.
Some testers using it found that it also helps with nand that has drastically slowed down from reading spots that never really get writes come back to normal speeds. In my case, I tried it on the PC I was working on and it really did help (the OS was already borked so it wasn’t going to hurt trying it out) with it loading much faster. Obviously the cheaper the flash/nand the faster issues will happen.
I have seen some random motherboards offer basically a pre-erase on SSDs that are acting slow before you re-install the OS to make sure a more complete flipping of cells happens and not just a basic formatting that just zeros the first parts of data and leaves the other cells alone. In that case the data/OS isn’t the focus and wouldn’t need a special paid software (I am only aware of SpinRite just because of the podcast and bought it to support the host that makes it). I am not sure of any free/FOSS software that does the same full drive cell flips, but I imagine there are some (or will be as flash/nand is used more and more).
Main take away is that it is important to make sure to not just let flash drives/SD/nand drives sit without at least hooking up to a PC every now and then. My PS Vita fell victim to just sitting around dead for a few years along with the Vita card I had in it. Fortunately the ROM with the OS is still working and I was able to at least set it up again.
Someone a while back put a set of very cheap SSDs through a torture test, and after exhausting many of the write cycles, left them alone for months. When powered back on for reads, the drives were slow as the error correction hardware was working overtime to compensate for the loss of trapped charge over time, but mostly recovered their performance after a while.
That said, I have a similar anecdote where one of my very worn test bench SSDs kept complaining about the same bad sectors despite OS reinstalls until I just overwrote it with zeros using
dd. Was fine for many months thereafter.I’ve no idea either if SpinRite has some secret sauce that FOSS utilities have yet to replicate, but it sounds like a non-destructive read-write test with
badblocksought to do the same.Also, my CF cards, SD cards, or USB drives from the early 2000s and early 2010s almost never give me trouble despite spending years unplugged. More recent flash memory is a different story though and I suspect the shrinking gate sizes and advent of TLC/QLC/PLC haven’t helped. I’ll usually splurge a little these days to get the industrial or high endurance MLC flavors and hopefully avoid the issue.
Good to hear that dd did the trick for you, and I will keep that one in mind the next time I need to re-install an OS on a drive that might be having the issues. SpinRite works by going sector by sector reading and copying the data, erases the sector, and then writes the data back. Not like something you would want to do all the time for sure. The creator of the program also said he will have the code go FOSS when he dies (pretty old but in good health). I am hoping that he is able to complete the full re-build he has in the works to have it work with how modern motherboards and controllers work (the current code-base is extremely old and requires turning off both Secure Boot and UEFI (or at least enable CSM) in order to boot the live USB (I think it still uses FreeDOS as the environment). There are ways to run it in a VM correctly, but I haven’t messed with trying that yet.
I also agree that it seems that really old cards and drives tend to not have the same issues as newer ones. Hell, I have even found that my floppies that are from the mid to late 90s and very early 00s tend to have a better chance of me still getting data off them. More of my mid to late 00s disks have issues with corrupted data. Found that out when going through a bunch of disks I had forgotten about, to get whatever I could last year.
The idea is for that, yes. I suppose buying up a bunch of low (4gb and lower) capacity cards off aliexpress won’t be too expensive, and would be ideal for the smaller games like Celeste or stuff from 2008 and earlier
Those really low capacity cards have DIRE read speeds though. I wouldn’t want to cheap out too much on them.
We have one SD card at work that seemingly works fine, but has read speeds of like single digit Mbps. It’s plenty for the arcade machine it runs with no more than 10mb roms at the max. But oof is it bad.
I have a 2GB card whose write access latency is over a second. No matter the file size. Reading is a lot better. Either way, since the ROM just gets loaded into RAM upon insertion, it doesn’t matter.
It would be pretty cool to share games using SD cards like that, but there would hardly be anyone to share them with.
Was this supposed to sound so self depreciating? Lol …or maybe it’s the reflection of myself. 😐
My first though was KZ OS. Cool name!
KZ reminds me od Kaizen from Event[0]
Serious question: Do I have to be a jew in order to use it?
(Because KZs and im German and stuff)
That’s a cute gimmick! Love it!! 😍
