For SNES specifically, you could about have every game ever made, your save data, and a light OS on a nice sd card.
There are some Pi rigs like that.
I’d rather see someone remake these old games so that the maximum object count can be raised. Just played a ROM of Link to the Past on SNES and the game crawls to a halt in some areas because the engine has to render several objects moving at once…
There’s a lot of support for NFC launchers too. Stuff like Zaparoo, and websites to make custom labels for them.
It’s not the same idea but it’s the same “take a thing off a shelf and use to to play a game” sort of vibe if that’s what you’re after. And it would be a lot cheaper, SD cards have skyrocketed lately.
You might want to check out Kazeta, it’s a project with similar goals
Woahh that’s so cool thx for linking
That looks epic… I’m guessing it doesn’t work with Steam games though?
It works for all DRM free games. A bunch of Steam games are DRM free so they will work, just not all. Here is a non complete list of DRM free Steam games
So Kazeta as others mention is about putting games onto SD cards.
Another project is https://zaparoo.org/ - this one doesn’t store the data on the card, but instead uses NFC so people can have “fake” cartridges that trigger the load of a game on the Linux system. This allows people to make something that looks great but is simply a stylish trigger to load the media (games, sites, movies, doesn’t matter what).
Never looked much into it, but I remember reading about kazeta somewhere on the fediverse and should work like that
Not quite but got this in my recommended after the whole PlayStation debacle
Plus this for the collection
Ok wait what’s the speed of access to the SD here? I always thought it would be a problem.
It’s slow and wasteful
Believe it or not theres a reason we install games locally these days. But many indie games would obviously work just fine.
But i don’t see the value here except nostalgia
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I only see this working properly if the game is made portable and saves all its data in the game folder. Which would leave mostly DOS games.
I dunno, cartridges don’t stop being cartridges if the save data is on the console instead of the cartridge.
Disc-based consoles certainly don’t put saves on the disc.
– Frost
I see no problem here.
It could also work if the game had an OS around it in the card, and you’re booting from it to play every time. It would be closer to how the cartridges worked from the player perspective.
If it’s a windows game, you could put the entire Wine prefix on the card and it would be portable. The performance would probably be pretty bad though. 2.5" SATA SSDs and a docking station would work a lot better.
Yeah but 2.5" SATA SSDs would be cost prohibitive at least compared to SD cards.
Large, high performance SD cards aren’t cheap either.
If you want something cheap, go with smart cards or RFID cards that will launch a game that’s already installed on the computer.
Good point :( Maybe it could work like a CD where it’ll install from the card and then you need to plug it in to launch the game lol
I mean, there is also the option of doing symbolic links from the standard save file location to a save folder on the SD card. A lot more work, and only works on systems you configure it for, but its doable.
It requires a steam client restart for refreshing, but I’ve been doing this for my steam games on Linux.
On the storage settings on steam you can add a new library on the external drive and move games to it. Both the game data and the compatdata folders are moved, so you keep the savegames and the whole protonprefix intact
Thought of this because of the Sony announcement.
Would there be an easy way to make the game auto-launch if the card is inserted?
I dunno if you’d wanna waste a whole sd card for a single game when you could fit hundreds on it.
The Snes rom set fits in 4gb with room for saves. A 16gb card could likely hold NES, SNES and N64.
Not if were talking cyberpunk and such
In that case you’d want them on something faster than an SD card, or loading times would be brutal.
I play cyberpunk and similar sized games from an SD card on steam Deck. It’s not brutal.
I looked but there doesn’t seem to be a straightforward way to do that in Linux. I was thinking a udev rule but it would be clunky since the low level details for media like SD cards aren’t available. At best, maybe a generic rule that mounts it and looks for an
autorun.shor something, but that’s basically reinventing Autoplay on Windows and would have the same security implications.I read Hack-a-Day frequently, and I’ve come across several projects that use NFC readers so you can tap a card to play specific songs or start playlists. Maybe something like that but launch a specific game instead?
e.g. https://hackaday.com/2025/03/31/a-music-box-commanded-by-nfc-tags/
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I think you might want to have a look at a MiSTer fpga.
(it provides a very authentic experience and can launch games with tags if you choose so)
Recalbox or similar are certainly a thing, but that doesn’t really help with GOG games so much as roms. Depends on what the end goal is.
What is a LogiLink?
It just looks like a generic SD card reader, but with a top mounted slot.
