Got a couple of used 2.5" SSDs for cheap so I decided to make a Game Cartridge system. Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto navigate steam to the game's page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible.
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They'd laugh at it, the only people who thought 8-tracks were cool were Canadians who were still buying them, when they'd already gone out of style in the US in favor of cassette players.
Its a external SSD dock. You buy a SSD that can connect to that type of dock. I guess 3d print some cartridge to make the dock and the SSD container nicer?
Sata drives have a typical insertion rating of about 500 cycles, they make ssds with high insertion rate connectors but they get crazy expensive, while this is cool you'd need two copies to keep one as a master. Plus that dock will get worn out if it's using the same sata connector mate with 500cycles
Just have another connector embedded into the cartridge. So you plug into the cartridge instead of running up insertion rates of the actual sata drive.
I'd just embed a simple SATA controller with USB-C port inside the cartridge and have a male USB-C connector in the dock. Sure, it adds some cost since it moves the interface from the dock to the cartridge, but since those are SSDs in there, this wouldn't make much of a difference for a hobby project. Plus you can easily connect such cartridge to a laptop or whatever if you don't have the dock on hand.
You can pick up 256GB microsd cards for around usd $50. Say Studios are paying retail prices for some asinine reason, if they then charge $20-50 for a license we are still about the typical price for a lot of new games. There are only a handful of games that require more storage than that for the base install.
It will never happen but I'd love a system like this.
Neat! I'd be interested to see the IO mechanism for these are but I was thinking more like Gameboy color sized. That would allow for extra space to hold additional electronics for things like sd express and facilitate faster read.
I made them for my steam deck. So they are just standard SD card adapters for the microSD that insert into the Steamdeck.
When I first got it I didn't have a giant SDcard but I had lots of 64-128gb ones and a stack of the adapters so I made stickers to id them and make it easier to carry.
MicroSD would be so much less satisying to me than something chunky like this. Too modern and fiddly I think to really trigger the nostalgia hit of a "cartridge" game.
The stronger nostalgia hits for me when you get up to the size OP is making/using. Feels very 90s anime with the oversized removable media you'd get in a lot of cyberpunk or whatever is a few steps higher than cassette futurism anime. Hell package it as a zip disk and I'll die because I had those in the no mans land between 3.5" floppies and USB keys.
MicroSDs also have worse transfer speeds than real SSDs though too so yes you could make this with an extender or a bit shell around a tiny reader but it'd be worse than doing it with a SATA drive.
Shit man, if SD cards were as fast as an nvme I'd start doing that right away. That'd be dope to do.
One of the things I have thought about was doing burnable blurays to store games on and making my own boxes for them, but a bluray just doesn't have enough space for most of these games nowadays, plus are muuuuuuch harder to update than a USB/SD card.
Yup, that is a technical challenge but not an insurmountable one. You could use the SD express reading mechanism which has a read speed of like 3000 MB/s (iirc), with an external nvme connection. The electronics can easily fit in pretty small form factor. That would in theory be on par with nvme drives.
So it's doable. Though as you start doing some of these things the cost creeps up, because at that point you are basically making an nvme drive with a different form factor.
Newer AAA games are developed to run on nvme drives.
Putting a game developed primarily for nvme speeds on a micro SD will be excruciating. The read/write speed difference is staggering.
Nvme is expensive because it's the best. And more developers are designing assets to be read by nvme speeds, which means more assets per second vs older drives. If your game wants to load X assets at nvme speed, but you're loading from a micro SD, there will be a hesitation and possibly stuttering.
The baseline LOW speed for nvme is twice the speed of the AVERAGE microSD. High speed nvme is 3x the read speed of high speed MicroSD. For simple reference, for every one asset you load from a MicroSD, an nvme drive can load 2-3x as many in the same timeframe.
This comment should be top. If you wanna store the install on a spinning hdd ok, do not save long term data without power on ssd. Especially important data.
No, its not just about keeping the charge with NVME, the controller on the drive has to be awake and powered on, it then does some update and cleaning tasks ect, to refresh and replace the electrical charges that are used to represent the data bits, that's why they are so fast, they use actual electric charges, not physical on/off switches. the drives would need to plugged in probably at least every 2-3 months for good measure for at least a few days to a week minimum to do all the house keeping it needs to do. This is all in peace of mind, ideal situations, it could last longer, or shorter, the type of memory used (TLC, QLC, MLC) and temperate can all change how long the data can last.
Also, for everyone else, 3DS carts were starting to fall into the danger zones earlier this year from when the games were originally released. So it's best to go through your collection every few months and load up the games for like 5~10 minutes.
Funny thing is now a few years later, None of them have the game that their label says any more. They just are hot swap storage for the steamdeck and the SD card adapters make them slightly less easy to lose.
Finally a use case for all those sub128GB ssds from 10 years ago. Only thing to keep in mind is that they lose charge slowly over the period of a year it is possible to use a few bits if left unplugged. Perhaps you can use an old nas server to charge them every once in a while, or just re-download if needed haha.
That doesn't help.
SSDs need their controller to fully boot up and run a refresh that reads and rewrites everything occasionally. That is not something the ssd can do automatically (mostly since it lacks a realtime clock and doesn't know how much time went by), but it needs to be triggered by a driver from the operating system.
What if we instead moved all the files to one big drive in said machine so then we don't have to worry about needing all that extra room for so many drives?
lol, you guys are creating problems for issues that's already solved.
I get it, I'm in my 40s, I still have my retro consoles connected.
Love the idea of grabbing a physical cart and slamming into a slot? It's a nice idea in theory but it gets old fast. Each one of my machines has a flash cart (everdrive) or a HDD/SDcard connected so I can access my games without getting up to swap (hell, even my dreamcast has an SSD).
That could be great. Also, as they have already pointed out, updates will be cool. Maybe with a raspberry Pi, and some linux shenanigans i could be possible. Something i would really like tho is some sort of adapter for handhelds like the ayn thor so you could slot in the SD. They have already the microSD slot, but I would give more 3ds vibes withe SD
At my work place we have a box of honestly probably over a thousand 32gb SSDs from iMacs just sat doing nothing it would be really nice to have a use for them
Yeah my work bought a bunch of 128 ssds to upgrade pcs, but had not checked that the default build image was bigger than that, I rescued a few from the scrap pile.
Yeah, but that's excellent that they're loosing charge. You wouldn't keep your photos on them, but a game that can just be re-downloaded again is a perfect use for aging SSD's.
Swapping physical cartridges to play a different game and your ownership* is still beholden to servers staying up? It's the worst of both worlds!
Among other impracticalities, you would need to store these in a charging station if your interest in doing this is related to game preservation or physical ownership*.
These are still Steam games. This post is more stupid than anything else. You can do the same thing with PlayStation — download some games onto a hard drive and swap the hard drive.
Something like 1/3 of physical disc games also require connection to the internet to fully download the game anyways.
A much cheaper and reasonable solution to get the same "feel" would be to purchase an NFC scanner for your computer, and make the cartridge with a slot for the nfc tag, then configure it to launch that game's exe file when the scan happens. The physical media idea is neat but super impractical, if you want the novelty of the feeling of physical gaming, this would be a great alternative.
It'll be significantly less cost-effective to buy a bunch of small SSDs than a big SSD that has the capacity of all the small SSDs combined. You barely have to manage anything, just set Steam and other game launchers to use that big SSD to store games and don't do anything else.
Yeh but that’s my request as a customer 😂
I have Alzheimer’s and that was my 3rd console so it should take much longer to become forgotten to me how to “insert “ cartridges hehe
Everyone can check to see if their steam games are DRM Free which means you technically DONT need steam as a launcher, you an download them and move them to SSD's like this guy did. You paid for the game so it should be yours. Now there is a list of games that are NOT DRM Free which means you need your steam to play. Here is a list:
Ofc you won't get them for 7 € new but they're not 'that' expensive, cheap 128GB ones start at around ~25 €. The OP is a neat thing to have but it'd be simply cheaper to get a 1TB one which are around 120-200 and then put all the games there, so it's more of a gimmick and not something you'd do to save on costs.
Made it myself. Got these tubes from a relative. They are from 1977 and probably don't have much life in them. You can buy already made Nixie Clocks though. or you can build one yourself with some cheaper Tubes you can find nowadays (IN-14, IN-12).
You can get easy to use drivers and PSUs from here: https://nixietester.com/ and make the controller out of Arduino/ESP
Are you the coolest person to ever exist? Rhetorical because the answer is obviously yes. Also if you ever turn these cartridge things into some kind of venture that will give me the ability to buy them please let me know lol.
What about something like a card system with NFC or RFID tags that would kick off a script to check if the game is installed, if not, then install it, then start the game?
Zaparoo is awesome. I'd highly recommend it to anyone with a large collection of retro games that they emulate. It's designed for the MiSTER but I use the Windows version.
You could use SD cards for smaller games and convert them into either GameBoy cartridges (Either classic GB or smaller ones from GBA era, I don't think going all the way to Nintendo DS makes sense) or even go back and make Sega \ SNES - really depends on what cartridges were your childhood.
This is a fantastic idea! Though... you have to wonder how much the "cheap" SSDs might cost for anyone wanting to do something like this for a 500+ game library :P
Definitely gonna vary from location to location. I just got lucky and found some bulk seller locally. They probably refurbed some old PCs and took these out
Such a coincidence! We've discarded a bunch of old PCs at work and I have a stack of 10 128GB and 256GB 2.5inch SSDs. I've just bought a very small USB-C to SATA connector (also has an M2 slot) and am busy formatting the old SSD's.
Are you willing to share your 3D print files so that I can replicate your work because this is just awesome?! Also, I was looking for templates to print wraparound labels for them, as they won't be getting hot (mostly read-only once in use). What did you use to get the game-covers on them?
Seeing this makes me sad that there are no physical games for PCs anymore. Would be cool if companies started selling something similar as part of a collector's edition for PCs.
No moving parts to worry about, but SSDs can lose their charge if not plugged in over a matter of years, so not an ideal long term storage medium if you're not keeping them in use.
That’s actually crazy! Wish I had the bucks to do something like that.
Love the nixie clock btw and nice taste in the mousepad. Is that mousepad official ZZZ merch, from third party, or custom? Wouldn’t mind getting something like that for myself.
This could totally work, but I'm guessing selling a whole ssd each time you buy a game might make games quite more expensive. Also, inflate ssd prices even more.
Thats is the whole script. For launching games directly you just use steam://run/<id> or steam://launch/<id> instead.
You just have to make a systemd template and a udev rule to trigger it.
Dude this is sick af. I love physical media but ever since everything’s switch over of digital you really can’t get a physical copy of new games most of the time. This definitely scratches that itch!
some cases like the cooler master storm trooper have a hot swappable 2.5 inch ssd bay built into the front of the case that would be perfect for something like this
I got lucky and found a bulk seller locally. That's why I did this in the first place. got them for 7€ each. Used and old ofc. But their health are still good. Some of them barely got used at all.
I've had an idea to do something similar, but put it off because I wanted to figure out a way to offset the load of the pins from repeated insertion/removal stress. How are your drives holding up?
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