Yea, so this doesn’t exist, but should it?
Think about:
- TheMovieDB style identifiers with box art
- Auto-generated and/or community created and upvoted DVD labels, case inserts, or USB/SSD stickers you can print yourself (no reason physical media has to be “round”)
- Automated scripts for generating local media savers/installers from GOG and Steam
This doesn’t seem like a very difficult thing to create for the niche community of people that want physical copies.
It feels like it would kind of defeat the purpose. If you like the ritual of physically picking a game and putting it into your machine, there are more practical ways of going at it, like those NFC card-based systems like Zaparoo. If you like having a physical collection, it seems to me that having a bookcase full of labels made with a home printer and with none of the legitimacy of them being “the real thing” would feel rather empty. You can’t legally resell it or lend it to others and if you care about preserving the game without being dependent on an external service that can go down at any time, you’re probably better off keeping several backups of your hard drive than counting on flaky recordable media (hard drives don’t last forever either, but you’re more likely to regularly check on the health of a couple of hard drives than potentially hundreds of BD-Rs and SD cards).
Basically, very few of the advantages of physical media would end up remaining.
Our own friendly neighborhood Perfect Dark did a write-up on a project called Kazeta a while back that seemed pretty cool.
Someone should make cases for mini NVMe SSDs to turn them into cartridges. NVMe SSD are technically plug and play and with an NVMe extension cable you could move the slot to the side or top of the case. Expensive as fuck to use NVMe for a single game, but much faster than SD Cards and they don’t wear down as fast and will retain the data longer when unpowered.
Hey, that’s me!!!
:)
That is a cool idea. Thanks im gonna do some research now.
Use SD cards or other external media as carts
Reads like a joke
If you want the game to last forever, it assumes you’ve already got it sourced from somewhere DRM-free, where you can continually copy it to other healthy media. Nothing lasts forever, but this is meant to replicate a lot of the strengths of old consoles, fortunately without some of their own pitfalls like save batteries.
SSTech requires power to maintain cells.
What we need is liberated schematics Blu-ray burner+ readers, so you can burn even a small cast, and reread until your descendants50 make another copy.Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.
Even pressed discs can rot. Like many WB Blu-Rays were made with a faulty process and many will rot in the next few decades.
All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.
Not for this project, you don’t.
While different, that’s pretty neat.
I mean, that’s basically what Limited Run Games do.
Didn’t they go out of business? I mean…they will NOW! Make a PS6 physical disc all you want, but if Sony never releases a PS6 with a disc drive, what good is it?
Just had a look and they’re still in business, although they were acquired by Embracer Group, so… Tick-tick.
But yeah, you’re right that even companies like that will go the way of the dodo if consoles abandon physical media.
They also make Switch and Xbox games.
Erm, there are a few of them that do the box art/moviedb style thing, they just dont host the game files.
Will edit with links in a bit.
