subliminalpanda•16h
Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90skazeta.org
124 comments
  • vunderba•12h

    Neat concept. I had to dig through a lot of the docs before I could get a good grasp of exactly how this works, though. It's an OS that mounts/searches all drives (such as an SD card reader) for the first available KZI file which is a format that describes how a specific game is run (the runtime, additional gamescope options, etc).

    While the idea of essentially mimicking old school carts by having a dedicated SD card per game is intriguing, I'm not sure I personally see the appeal of something like this over a Steam Deck + EmuDeck installed - particularly since you'll probably need to build/buy a miniPC that is compatible with Kazeta.

    Another concern would be controller compatibility, from what I can see only one controller is listed as being officially supported (8Bitdo Ultimate 2C Wireless Controller).

    https://github.com/kazetaos/kazeta/wiki/Requirements

    • Yokolos•5h

      I've imitated something like this for my Steam Deck by just keeping a bunch of games on sdcard and switching them out when I want to play something else. Sure, it's technically a complete waste of time and I don't suggest you do or anybody else do it. But I have fun doing it and that's all that matters in this case that has no effect on anybody else.

      I find it odd when people on Hacker News say "but why?" Because I can, dude, and it makes me happy.

      On that note, this project sounds awesome to me.

      • belthesar•1h

        “But why” is an ever present question on Hacker News, with the announcement of Dropbox being rebutted with “But why, we have FTP”.

        Not every idea that rethinks an existing system will have the same merit or success of course, but I think it’s fair that sometimes a potential user will say that they think their existing system is fine and that others should adopt it vs consider something new.

    • Saline9515•5h

      It's nice if you have kids in a no-tv house and want to allow them to experience retro-gaming while being able to control what is played, and how. Scarcity has it virtues, too.

      • unixhero•5h

        >Scarcity has it virtues, too.

        I would even wager to say; Without it, we're doomed.

        • mystraline•4h

          We have enough food production to feed 30 billion people, and throw away massive amounts.

          We have plenty of land and housing could be inexpensive or free for all.

          Sunlight, wind, and tidal is literally 1kW/1m^2 free energy.

          Pirates already can watch anything, listen to petabytes of music, access nearly every book including academic papers.

          We really could be living in post-scarcity world. But its the oligarchs and billionaires who want to keep the spoils for themselves. And in the USA alone 8 billionaires own as much resources as the bottom 60% does.

          Simply put, material scarcity is a fucked mindset. And we could grow past that - in fact I think we have to.

          • integralid•2h

            But we, at least in western society, want much more than just food. Even assuming that zero food waste is realistic.

            Land is pretty cheap, except when you want to live in a city, especially big. Which is what most people want.

            Sunlight is free, solar panel manufacturing and maintenance is not.

            Pirates watch things for free, but the people that pay fund the production.

            Most expensive things are expensive because they require labor, which is expensive. And people tend to actually want expensive things, even if they don't strictly require them - either as a status symbol, or just to make their life easier (a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner is not required to live, but most people can't imagine living without one).

            Simply put, I think you either greatly oversimplify the problem and handwave the problem by just blaming "billionaires" for everything, or I don't understand your point properly.

    • vanderZwan•11h

      > It's an OS that mounts/searches all drives (such as an SD card reader) for the first available KZI file which is a format that describes how a specific game is run (the runtime, additional gamescope options, etc).

      I hope it also supports putting multiple games on one cartridge and choosing between them at boot time? Don't see a reason to waste a multi-gigabyte SD card on a single ROM of a few megabytes.

      • cout•9h

        Is it still possible to buy smaller SD cards in bulk, maybe 8mb or 16mb? The smallest I could find was 128mb for about the same price as a 2gb card.

        While I like the idea of physically separate cards for each game, at $10 per card it seems economically limiting.

        • DSMan195276•3h

          As an alternative you can still buy small flash drives in bulk (Amazon has listings of 128MB ones for less than a dollar per drive). They don't look as good as SD cards on their own but you could rip out the internals and place them in 3d printed enclosures, which could be an even better result.

          I would assume the quality of those things is not great, but the design of this system means they're basically read-only so that should hopefully help them survive longer.

        • ofrzeta•5h

          The smallest I could find was 128MB (see adjacent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45101932) on Aliexpress but you are right, they are comparatively expensive. A source for those obsolete cards would be great. Have they all been shredded by now? Or is there a forgotten shipping container somewhere? :)

        • jnaina•6h

          <$3 bucks for 16GB on AliExpress

          • grugagag•5h

            Still feels like a waste to put 4mb game on it

            • gravitronic•5h

              Don't worry, it's actually a 4MB SD card with a fake sticker

        • fragmede•3h

          Given storage sizes, the cartridge is symbolic. Use NFC tags and a reader and just load the appropriate ROM off disk.

      • deadbabe•10h

        It’s more romantic to have each game on individual cards that you can touch and feel rather than cramming a bunch of them onto one card.

        When you hold a game cart in your hand, you can close your eyes and imagine holding that entire game’s essence in the palm of your hand, you can see it and picture it, and in this sense it’s no longer just bits of data, but rather an entire world just waiting to be explored.

        These people who don’t want carts and just want everything downloaded straight to a device and packed in an NVME can fuck off, I see now that it was this kind of min/max thinking that killed a lot of the fun rituals that made the gaming experience more magical. The practicality and instant gratification wasn’t worth the trade off, that’s why games suck today and we get micro-transactions and subscriptions shoved down our throats.

        • probably_wrong•10h

          It would be 90s accurate, though, as pirate multi-game cartridges [1] were very common (and very cheap) at the time.

          Same goes for the Atari 2600, with the difference that the game selection was made with physical switches instead of a menu screen.

          [1] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ullO54qsP_8

        • npteljes•8h

          That's a flawed premise, as games totally don't suck today. There are so many to choose from, and people create new ones all the time, experiences where you can clearly feel that they poured their hearts and sweat into it.

          For me, the practicality of gaming doesn't get in the way of the same enjoyment that you described feeling. I love it that I can have my favorites and current ones loaded in a single console, which I hold exactly as dearly as you described with the game cartridge. To me, most games are experiences though, and therefore I have no use for the media, packaging etc after I have experienced it. When I want to refresh my memories, I rather look at the screenshots and videos I took of the game, rather than the box or cartridge, as the media I created is much more personal.

        • GlacierFox•9h

          I have fond memories of looking at all my GameBoy Advance games stacked up on the shelf as a kid now and then. The idea that there's a little world in each individual one I can dive in to brought great joy. I totally get you. Sure there were custom carts back then to stuff 100 games into one cart but I didnt ever feel like getting one even back then, sucked a little of the joy out of it for me.

        • vunderba•2h

          I grew up in that era.

          And part of that magic was the UNIQUENESS of the "cartridge", be it a Genesis cart, an NES cart, or even a PC big box. Having them displayed in your bedroom on a shelf was part of that experience. Personally I think you lose a lot of this magic with a tiny and somewhat generic looking SD card.

          Also let's not pretend that there wasn't a metric F###-ton of garbage day games [1] back in the day. The only difference is the barrier to entry to game development and production is significantly lower - so there's just orders of magnitude more.

          There are still plenty of VERY high quality games released today - you're either not looking for them or deliberately choosing to ignore them. (Spelunky, Shovel Knight, BG3, Tomb Raider 2013, Doom Eternal, Cuphead, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, etc.)

          - [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LJN

        • otabdeveloper4•3h

          We had MS-DOS shovelware shareware on CD-ROM back in the day. The cartrige thing is a specific nostalgia thing not everyone experienced.

        • electroglyph•9h

          i can't say i totally agree with you, but i love your opinion nonetheless =)

      • anal_reactor•10h

        Practicality is exactly why we abandoned the old designs.

        • stuaxo•9h

          Yep, but we didn't realise what we were throwing out.

          Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.

          • npteljes•8h

            We are "throwing out" outdated parts of culture, and for one, I'm mostly indifferent to that. For one, because I'm sure that there will be people who dislike this and try to preserve it, and so, it won't be all be lost forever. Secondly, because culture will always find a way, and I sense the strength in me to find it as well. I have experienced many times that I have listened to all the good music, played all the best games, or seen the most impactful movies. And yet, I always seem to find something that completely blows my mind.

            >Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.

            The same could be said in reverse. Just to highlight that this is a subjective experience, and not an objective truth. "Having an infinite pool of music somehow makes in mean more, as opposed to the dusty collection that you happen to have at home".

          • slightwinder•8h

            The simple reason is: picking things is annoying. Organizing physical objects is even more annoying, especially if they are bigger. Then you need more physical objects, to organize the physical objects you use, this takes up even more space. And physical organization is also very limited. You have no database, no dynamic filters, no metadata... At the end, having a tangible thing wears off very fast and just becomes a burden.

            • camgunz•7h

              A lot of people in the retro gaming space have the conflict you describe. On the one hand, there are a lot of games. Like, a lot. Some (many?) games have multiple versions even! And this is without talking about mods and homebrew.

              On the other, there's something deeply "unmagical" about loading up a huge menu of games. Even if they're organized in some way (console, genre, studio, whatever), even if you include box art and info, it's simply not the same experience. Most retro gaming channels I watch on YouTube talk about this phenomenon--mostly in the context of "why do you have shelves full of games".

              Different people will think different things about this. I have a 77 square meter home (~830ft2) and like, I'm not fitting all the games I ever bought in this place, let alone all the albums, books, etc. I have flash carts, hard drives, and a kindle keyboard v3. I kind of chalk it up to "life is a beautiful struggle". Friction is good, actually, it enriches life, and these kinds of little agonies are fun to just discuss and find common experience over.

          • tines•9h

            Thank you. Why do so few people understand this?

            • idle_zealot•9h

              It's completely subjective. It's not an uncommon feeling, but it's far from a universal truth. Some nerds like collecting cards, some like stamps, some like dolls or statues. You like collecting and holding data storage devices. People derive meaning and joy from different parts of life. There's not an understanding being missed, but a difference in preference.

            • npteljes•8h

              Because it's not understanding, which would imply an objective truth, but a subjective experience. I personally have great appreciation to music and games, but really dislike physical media at the same time. The way I like to experience them is much better supported by the digital solutions, than the analogue.

              Although, to be honest, if the digital world didn't exist at all, I'm sure I'd manage to have a good time all the time. It's just that now that it exists, I prefer it more - streaming over physical media for example.

            • anal_reactor•9h

              Because it's not fucking practical. You do it once, it's cool. You do it twice, all right. You do it three times, it's annoying. Most people live in tiny apartments and are overworked, when they have a moment to play games, the "click to run" experience is vastly superior over searching for something in a mountain of plastic that could've been a chair or a plant instead.

              I think that what you really want is going back to pre-internet times when access to media was limited, so every single piece of media had value. You had one casette, you'd listen to it back to back because there was nothing else. Nowadays media feel meaningless not because they're not put on physical plastic, but because you have infinite access to it at all times. Some people argue that you could try to restrict yourself to some specific subset, but deep down you'll always know it's just a theatre.

              Since I accepted the fact that I hate most of humanity and 99% of commercial products are slop, I started valuing things much more. The rush of "wow I found something that isn't slop" mimics the old feeling of getting a new disc.

              • andrepd•8h

                > Because it's not fucking practical. You do it once, it's cool. You do it twice, all right. You do it three times, it's annoying. Most people live in tiny apartments and are overworked, when they have a moment to play games, the "click to run" experience is vastly superior over searching for something in a mountain of plastic that could've been a chair or a plant instead.

                There's already every single mainstream platform offering what you want. This is clearly a niche product serving a niche usecase: recreating the experience of physical carts like an SNES or a PS2 or a Gameboy. Some people, necessarily a minority, enjoy this. Why are you so angry? I don't get it.

                • jamespo•5h

                  Yes, they seem very angry for someone living in a digital paradise

          • Chris2048•4h

            Why not just maintain a personal playlist?

          • NaomiLehman•9h

            or a book vs Kindle

    • Chris2048•4h

      You could also just have the games already on the console/pc and the cartridge is just a "key" needed to play it?

      • wolrah•2h

        This is the idea behind Zaparoo (https://zaparoo.org/) which uses NFC tags that can be put in to your preferred form (card, cartridge, token, etc.) and used to select and launch games. It was originally built for use with the MiSTer FPGA hardware emulation platform but has since expanded to support a variety of software emulation platforms and apparently even actual C64s via a flash cart.

  • lproven•6h

    This sounds potentially interesting, but the website is so vague it's criminal.

    I have absolutely no idea what the "console gaming experience of the 1990s" was. What console? What experience?

    I've only owned 3 games consoles in my life.

    An original XBox, a gift from a friend which I immediately hacked to be an XBox Media Centre and used daily for years but never played a game on again.

    A PS2.

    And now a Wii for my kid.

    For any website or any publicity material it is always a mistake to rely on shared experience, because whatever your experience, there are billions of people out there who do not share it.

    So don't rely on it. Say what your product is and does and how it does it.

    This page does not.

    • mulletbum•6h

      I have to say, this is not targeted at you. I know exactly what a 1990s gaming experience is like and xbox is the console that killed it completely.

      • ramon156•4h

        Never assume the reader knows what you're talking about, that's bad writing.

        • bondarchuk•2h

          Could one be forgiven for assuming on the internet that people know what "console gaming" or "the 1990s" are? I expected the worst reading this comment thread before clicking TFA but it's really very straightforward.

          • lproven•2h

            Well of course I know. But I never owned a games console in the 1990s, I've never played a game on a 1990s console, so I have no clue what aspect of the experience is being captured or not.

        • MithrilTuxedo•3h

          It really depends on the context.

          Everyone's bandwidth would be saturated if no one assumed their reader knew what they were talking about, but assumption is a form of lossy compression that allows both miscommunication and misunderstanding.

        • GuinansEyebrows•2h

          conversely: never assume the writing is for everybody :)

      • lproven•4h

        My point is general.

        That's what I was talking about.

        Don't assume -- especially when writing. Always explain because people outside your target audience will read what you write and they may go on to buy a million of your product, or give you a job, or something.

        • ninetyninenine•31m

          Suggestion: Stop giving instructions to people and talking down to them, people generally don't like this.

    • carra•6h

      Not saying you are wrong about that, but if you don't know about 90s console gaming and you only used the XBox as media center you are likely not the target audience for this project anyway.

    • philistine•3h

      Simple mathematics will help you here. All three consoles you mention all came out after 2000, which means this is not what the project is trying to replicate.

    • cornstalks•4h

      The page does say it, though it might be easy to overlook if you don't understand the significance of the statements:

      > Zero setup

      > Direct to gameplay

      > Distraction-free gaming

      > Use SD cards or other external media as carts

      The 90s gaming console experience was:

      1. Grab your game cartridge.

      2. Insert cartridge into console.

      3. Turn on console.

      4. Play the game.

      There are no steps between 3 and 4. The console booted directly into the game. It was fast and there was no messing with multimedia experience stuff (like Xbox or PS later introduced).

      I have no experience with Kazeta but this is what I would expect from its homepage.

      • dan353hehe•2h

        I got a patch:

          @@ -12,6 +12,8 @@ The 90s gaming console experience was:
  
  1. Grab your game cartridge.
  
  +1.5. Blow into the cartridge slot for some reason to make the game boot on the first try. But in reality you are slowly destroying the contacts and making the problem worse.
  +
  2. Insert cartridge into console.

  3. Turn on console.
        Fixed it.

        Honestly though, the experience of just turning it on and being in game was great. I had access to an NES and an SNES growing up and have a lot of great memories playing games with friends.

      • lproven•2h

        Great! Thank you. That's much more helpful.

      • flufluflufluffy•3h

        I think it’s confusing particularly because it pushes the whole “zero setup” thing, then when you go to the docs to figure out what the heck the thing is it describes a long list of things one would need to do in order to set up a working physical machine running Kazeta and the cartridges etc... The website itself reads like it’s an app you can just download and run, while at the same time hinting that you’re gonna need to do a fair amount of physical stuff without really explaining the whole thing.

        • bondarchuk•2h

          The 2nd and 3rd words on the page are "operating system", it is obvious that an operating system must be installed before it can be used.

    • tonyhart7•2h

      basically boomer gamer that has nostalgia playing 8bit mario

      • ZenoArrow•46m

        It's not nostalgia for a game, it's wanting to get back to plug-and-play gaming experiences.

        With consoles in the 70s/80s/90s, when you put a game into the console and turned it on, you launched directly into the game. That immediacy is lost when you end up with endless software updates and having to launch games from a menu. If you didn't live through that time I can understand why you aren't nostalgic for it.

  • catapart•41m

    This is very cool! My one gripe would be the one-card, one-game situation. I understand why it would be done, but I also remember growing up in the 90's and there was no point where I was happy that I had to switch out the games.

    It's not terrible, but if the cards can store more, they should. It's just practical.

    Other than that, though, this is something I've been dreaming of! Mostly just the "it plays games and those games are yours to play" angle of it, not so much the "no internet, no dlc" kind of stuff. Those seem less like features and more like eliminating avenues for future bad actors. Which, again, is understandable, I just wasn't particularly hoping for that.

    • ranger_danger•28m

      They're literally just SD cards, so I think you can do whatever you want... none of this is new or novel at all to my knowledge.

      I understand the novelty, and maybe I'm just grumpy, but I just can't get on the nostalgia cashgrab bandwagon personally.

      But whatever floats your boat.

  • ofrzeta•6h

    I am currently working on something like this for audio, basically just like a MP3 player with full size SD cards that plays automatically when you insert them (for kids). It's actually quite hard to find full size SD cards these days and when you do they are comparatively expensive (opposed to current micro SD cards).

    Also I wanted to have low capacity like 128MB, so the concept "one album, one card" (as in the OP - "one game, one card") makes sense. These are even harder to get and more expensive (in terms of money per storage). Naively I thought that obsolete hardware should be cheap.

    • ndriscoll•5h

      It's probabably more sensible to have a drive for your full music collection and then use an NFC reader + cards to trigger an album. I see you can get 100 NFC cards for $22 on amazon right now. I saw some German blogs about doing this a few years back.

      • allenu•3h

        I remember seeing a blog post about this exact thing using nice little square NFC cards with the album covers on them. For anybody interested: https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player

      • Lalabadie•55m

        Phoniebox is another popular implementation of the idea: https://phoniebox.de

      • ofrzeta•5h

        You are right that this is probably the more reasonable thing to do. I was just thinking that 1) I want to use full-size cards for better haptic and 2) have the actual data stored on the media. For instance when you are in the car with your playback box and the SD card you can listen without a network connection. But I concede that I am stubborn and this will probably be a dead end :)

        • ndriscoll•4h

          You still don't need a network connection. Put a drive or SD card with all of your music in the player itself. You could put several hundred CDs worth of music in FLAC on a device for like $20, or up to like 4,000 CDs with a 2TB card (or 16,000 with an 8 TB drive), so probably more than anyone could reasonably own (or manage for a physical collection). Pennies of amortized storage cost per album even if you have multiple devices. It's nothing next to the cost of legally acquiring the music.

    • Timpy•5h

      This is something I want to see in the world. Do you have a public repo? I'm currently doing third party application development for the Yoto, and I've done a lot of hacking on MP3s. If you're open source I'd be interested in helping, or at the very least chatting about the project.

      • ofrzeta•5h

        Eventually I will write a blog post. The software is actually not much, just some basic Arduino stuff. I am using an ESP32, a full size SD card board and a VS1053 board (both connected via SPI). The software is currently just trying to read from the SD card in a loop and when it can it just plays the MP3 files in order. Other things that are not connected to software is a Li-Ion battery, charger circuit, step-up converter, LM386 based amplifier circuit and a speaker :)

    • 112233•6h

      Super interested in something like this. Currently there is no easily operated audiobook player for elderly or people with severe arthritis.

      My eventual workaround was cheap bluetooth speaker (because expensive ones did not remember playback position inside a track) and a whole heap of super low capacity usb drives.

      • pipes•6h

        https://uk.yotoplay.com/yoto-mini

        My wife bought this. I was deeply sceptical. But it's lovely, you can put story cards in it. My 6 year old daughter loves it. And we listen to a daily yoto podcast at dinner every day.

        Edited, found link to version we own

  • hmry•12h

    Happy to see they're actually putting the games onto the cartridges. Most projects like this just use pieces of plastic with an NFC/RFID tag containg the Steam game ID. For me, the fact that the data is actually right there in my hand is half the appeal.

    • imiric•11h

      I appreciate that as well, but SD cards still aren't the same as old game cartridges. On consoles up to the Nintendo 64, plugging in a cartridge expanded the physical memory of the system, and the CPU read data directly from the ROM on the cartridge. This is why there were no loading screens.

      On SNES, and I believe N64 as well, cartridges could also expand the graphical capability of the system, which made some games really special.

      Replicating this on a modern indie console would, of course, be prohibitively expensive and impractical. The speed of modern hardware and physical media, along with more sophisticated game engines, has also practically eliminated loading screens. And this likely wouldn't be an issue on small indie games either.

      Still, this is not strictly about loading screens. There was something magical about game consoles before roughly the fifth generation which we're unlikely to ever experience again. Nostalgia probably plays a role in that feeling, but the way they worked was truly different from what we have today. Modern game consoles are essentially small PCs within a walled garden.

      • murderfs•10h

        > I appreciate that as well, but SD cards still aren't the same as old game cartridges. On consoles up to the Nintendo 64, plugging in a cartridge expanded the physical memory of the system, and the CPU read data directly from the ROM on the cartridge. This is why there were no loading screens.

        SD Express is just NVMe over a PCIe lane, so you'll get to do all sorts of fun DMA tricks when it starts becoming more popular.

      • GTP•11h

        What you said is true, but this project is about replicating the experience, not the hardware. Maybe it will feel less magical, but the hacks you described were cool but needed due to HW limitations of the time. Using commodity hardware not only makes economic sense now, but also makes the project much more accessible by not requiring a specific console.

  • brabel•13h

    Before reading this I didn’t realize how today gaming is different from 80’s and 90’s gaming , to the point Kazeta is a thing! I thought that mostly, CDs had replaced cartridges and loading games became slow, but apparently subscription plans, online chat and “micro transactions” are now accepted as standard gaming?!

    • npteljes•8h

      Of course. Physical media is long out. What was the last time you saw a laptop with a DVD drive?

      On PC especially, online is first. Games come with update managers, "launchers", and that's the absolute standard - publishers either roll their own, or submit to established ones like Steam.

      Micro-transactions are accepted, but far from universal. People bemoan them for some reason, but I'd say that the vast majority of games don't have it.

      Subscriptions normally come with games with a managed online gaming experience. How else are supposed to be funded, I wonder? I think it's normal to pay for a service, be that gaming, or a gym membership.

      • sgbeal•6h

        > Micro-transactions are accepted, but far from universal. People bemoan them for some reason, ...

        Because, for one, with them came "Pay to Win". Nothing good comes from Pay to Win except that someone lines their pockets.

        A professor once told us that something like 1/3rd of people have personalities which are prone to become truly addicted to something. Microtransactions, regardless of their justification[^1], actively target personalities which are especially prone to instant gratification and the endorphins triggered by spontaneous purchases.

        [^1]: They _are_ fundamentally justified - it costs money to keep any digital service going, and tons of it for a service like an MMORPG.

        • npteljes•5h

          Yeah, I agree with you. I handwaved micro-transactions away too much, because of what an easy time I have with them. But I truly dislike them as well, especially for the exploitation factor.

          To rephrase what I originally wanted to say: "Micro-transactions are accepted, but far from universal. Gaming got huge - even if you discard every game that has micro-transactions, the catalogue is still vast and impressive."

      • voidUpdate•4h

        I have several laptops with a DVD drive, so the last time I saw one was last night

        • npteljes•3h

          That's cool! They rarely come with them though these days. I have taken a quick look at two large webshops of my location: one had 1200 machines with 0 of them having an optical drive, and the other had 5500 machines, with 2 of them having optical drives.

    • ZaoLahma•13h

      Yep. Most games nowadays are released broken and incomplete. Being able to patch a game after release truly is both a blessing and a curse. Then they throw microtransactions on top of the already rather ugly mess.

      Microtransactions were supposed to finance free to play or "live service" games where they paid for new content over several years, but (of course) they've found themselves into what's solidly not... that.

      • opan•6h

        >Being able to patch a game after release truly is both a blessing and a curse.

        Very true. We got stuff like Minecraft, Terraria, and Core Keeper that got updates to improve the game at no additional cost for years after release, but we also got early access games that sell you on a potentially good future game, and only sometimes deliver. Starbound is a disappointment that often comes to mind.

    • voidfunc•12h

      Have you been living under a rock for the last 15+ years?

      I haven't touched a CD since the late 2000s.

      • rkagerer•12h

        Have you been living under a rock for the last 15+ years?

        Yes, and I'm not coming out until projects like this finish scooping up all the crap MBA's have excreted all over the place in that time.

      • pansa2•11h

        CDs specifically are obsolete, but games on optical media are still a thing. Unlike ROM cartridges, which AFAICT died with the GBA in 2008.

        • masklinn•11h

          While they’re flash rather than rom, the switch 2 still supports physical distribution media.

          • euLh7SM5HDFY•9h

            I was under wrong impression that it doesn't. They really muddied the water with those other "game-key cards".

          • pansa2•11h

            True, but the way they work is more like discs than ROMs: their data isn’t immediately available but needs to be loaded into RAM.

            • masklinn•3h

              True, but the low latency and constant-ish access patterns of flash makes a lot of its performance characteristics closer to ROM than CDs, even with the intermediate copy.

        • sgbeal•6h

          > Unlike ROM cartridges, which AFAICT died with the GBA in 2008.

          Look up the Gameboy 3DS :).

    • reactordev•12h

      My children have only known micro transaction riddled games. When I show them old school games, they scoffed at the graphics and returned to their phones.

      • ranger_danger•22m

        Why would one allow their children to grow up with dangerous addictive slop knowing full-well that it's bad and what the better alternatives are?

    • carra•11h

      Also, don't forget there are now launchers (you can't run your game yourself, it has to go through us) and EULAs (you can only play what you buy in our terms). Nice times indeed...

    • alex_suzuki•12h

      I had to explain to my kids (10 and 6yr old) recently what this shiny round thing was that they got from the library…

      • sgbeal•6h

        Back around 1990 my youngest brother, who had always seen CDs, asked me one day, "what are those things in your closet?" "What things?" "They look like CDs but they're big and black!" He had never seen a record before.

      • Gabrys1•11h

        They got a coaster from the library?

    • hulitu•13h

      > apparently subscription plans, online chat and “micro transactions” are now accepted as standard gaming?!

      And looong download/update times (Delta Force - almost 4 hours). Makes a ZX Spectrum which loaded games from cassettes pale in comparison.

  • carra•11h

    Though it may be impractical I can definitely see the appeal of something like this. I'm not a fan of the current gaming model. Games we buy should be something we can own, preserve and control. It would be enticing to have a physical collection of actual, working games and to be able to use them without internet connection, user accounts, EULAs, launchers, stores, etc.

  • robbbbbbbbbbbb•8h

    Such a cool concept! For anyone who didn't slog through their docs, the recommended hardware system (and the box in their product shots) is the Geekom A5 https://www.geekom.co.uk/geekom-a5-mini-pc and the 8BitDo Wireless controller https://www.8bitdo.com/ultimate-2c-wireless-controller/

    Those + some SD cards and a spare evening for setup makes this a really tempting £400 project.

    • SomeoneOnTheWeb•7h

      For the same price you have the Minisforum UM760 Slim which should be 100% compatible and provide VASTLY superior performances. Or you can check cheaper models that would have the same level of performance as the A5.

      Geekom make nice products but they are usually both very expensive and very noisy compared to competitors. Their selling point is mainly their top-notch design, but I find these to be function-over-form most of the time.

      • robbbbbbbbbbbb•7h

        I guess the lack of a built-in SD card slot might make the Minisforum options less attractive

        • SomeoneOnTheWeb•5h

          Right, if you specifically want to use an SD card and not USB, and don't want to add an adapter either, sure the A5 is the way to go.

          • robbbbbbbbbbbb•3h

            Yeah, definitely boils down to how much of a factor the aesthetics of the 'tiny carts' is for you in the whole experience. I can imagine some creative modding that would make a collection of themed USBs just as appealing, if not more :)

  • Waterluvian•9h

    My kids play the N64 more than the Wii because the Wii is quite frustrating to set up and maintain batteries and controller connections. The Switch is even more awful, but they’ll play it handheld. The PS5 is complex but generally straightforward. It helps that the controllers are big and we have a nice, clean charging dock for them. The Switch charging dock is finicky and annoying with the tiny controllers.

    I think my immediate feedback is that the game cards could be a lot bigger. Anyone out there want to make a ridiculously beefy SD card adapter and corresponding slot? Or maybe even one that interfaces like a puck/block with some keying and locking.

    But overall this is 100% on target for my 6 and 8 year olds. They want to play games, not operate a console.

    We take them to a Retro Gaming night every few months and I’ve noticed that the X-in-1 consoles (even the brand names) are rarely touched, and all have laminated cards desperately attempting to tell kids how to get into a game. The console UX is paramount.

    • cornholio•8h

      > They want to play games, not operate a console.

      I've gifted my decade old development laptop (after a beefy RAM+SSD upgrade to the best modern version it supports) to my 7 y/o nephew and he seems satisfied. It cold boots Windows 10 in less than 30 seconds and he can play Minecraft, Roblox, BeamNG, watch Youtube etc. in the living room where he can be supervised, without hoarding the family TV with their console.

      Sure, a lower friction device is preferable, but the ultimate thing is that it plays the games they and their friends play.

  • serf•12h

    sd card contact wear is pretty radical on constant insert/removal.

    second: one of the things that made cartridges great was that they were human-sized. as were CDs. An sd card inserted into a more handle-able/human 'cartridge' would be cool, maybe gameboy sized was about perfect imo.

    fiddling with sd cards and slots isn't great.

    an snes/genesis cartridge falls into the thing, you can't miss or do it backwards without reeally trying to. They give an affirmative 'clunk' when fully engaged.

    (also the contact wear on those was horrendous too.. maybe the SD card IS authentic..)

    • darkwater•12h

      An SD card is not that different from what the Switch uses, at least size wise. Use micro-SD for the actual data and a cheap SD adapter with a full size SD slot and contact wear should be an easily solvable issue.

      • sankao•10h

        Also solves the wear and tear issue.

    • Dead_Lemon•4h

      Replicating something like a form factor of a Gameboy cart is a cool idea, you could probably get away with a I2C EEEPROM of a size large enough for a single rom.

  • tantalor•3h

    Sounds basically like Ouya with bring-your-own-hardware.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya

  • judge123•12h

    It's less about nostalgia for the 90s and more about a cure for the modern "too much choice" anxiety.

    • bondarchuk•2h

      Don't underestimate how nice and legitimately useful it is to organize real physical objects in real physical space as opposed to dragging icons around on a computer screen. Not just for some vague feel-good or nostalgia reasons but the user experience is really just significantly better for some 10s or low-100s of objects.

  • morsch•13h

    Neat. Couldn't find a video of it booting up. But here's some background info: https://github.com/kazetaos/kazeta/wiki/Technical-Details

    • reactordev•12h

      >When accessing the terminal/tty, the default username and password is gamer. Because /etc is read-only, this password cannot be changed.

      Oh noes! A little further down they say you can get it online using an Ethernet cable and a command. Let’s just hope its never able to be an ssh host. These kind of things scare me from a security standpoint. I feel like the users and /etc/passed should probably be writable so people can change the default to something not published online.

  • ThinkBeat•7h

    This does indeed look cool but is should say:

    "A Linux distribution focused on console gaming".

    Whenever I see OS I get excited to see a new operating system but end up disappointed when it is yet another distro.

    • Ericson2314•4h

      Yeah, came here to say the same thing. It's really criminal. People need to stop doing this.

  • jsilence•9h

    A wonderful gift idea for nerd friends.

  • larodi•12h

    …save for the CRT

  • snvzz•12h

    Not a fan of the trend of misusing the concept of "Operating System".

    • coolcoder613•12h

      Calling Linux distros operating systems is a very common usage.

      • Gabrys1•11h

        Linux distros are operating systems in my dictionary. Unlike Linux which is just an OS kernel.

    • flumpcakes•12h

      It seems like an operating system to me. What specifically is misused?

      • TickleSteve•10h

        The technical definition of opoerating system is the software that manages the resources of the computer, i.e. RAM, storage, processor time, etc (Typically known as the Kernel).

        This usage is more "User Interface" or "shell".