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).
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.
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.
I would even wager to say; Without it, we're doomed.
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.
While I like the idea of physically separate cards for each game, at $10 per card it seems economically limiting.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
@@ -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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't touched a CD since the late 2000s.
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.
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.
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.
And looong download/update times (Delta Force - almost 4 hours). Makes a ZX Spectrum which loaded games from cassettes pale in comparison.
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.
Here's the repo: https://github.com/coconauts/minilos
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.
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
Those + some SD cards and a spare evening for setup makes this a really tempting £400 project.
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.
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.
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.
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..)
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.
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.
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.
Really interested to see where this goes and wish the team the absolute best!
"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.
This usage is more "User Interface" or "shell".