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).
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.
“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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
@@ -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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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?!
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.
>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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 :)
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
I did something like this a while ago. What I did is upon reading the NFC tag with a raspberry pi, I'd call the spotify API to play an album in my google home.
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.
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 :)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Readit News
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
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.
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.
Dead Comment
Dead Comment
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.