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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
sd card contact wear is pretty radical on constant insert/removal.
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..)
An SD card is not that different from what the Switch uses, at least size wise. Use micro-SD for the actual data and a cheap SD adapter with a full size SD slot and contact wear should be an easily solvable issue.
Replicating something like a form factor of a Gameboy cart is a cool idea, you could probably get away with a I2C EEEPROM of a size large enough for a single rom.
Don't underestimate how nice and legitimately useful it is to organize real physical objects in real physical space as opposed to dragging icons around on a computer screen. Not just for some vague feel-good or nostalgia reasons but the user experience is really just significantly better for some 10s or low-100s of objects.
>When accessing the terminal/tty, the default username and password is gamer. Because /etc is read-only, this password cannot be changed.
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.
This is very cool! My one gripe would be the one-card, one-game situation. I understand why it would be done, but I also remember growing up in the 90's and there was no point where I was happy that I had to switch out the games.
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.
Maybe a good idea for you would be to have a few cards per system (like: SNES plaftormers, or Game Boy RPGs). Or even just 1 card per system: SNES card, Game Boy card, etc. with the full catalogue. There would still be wasted space, but much more practical.
I love the idea of this. Not so much for myself; I want a system with tons of games that I can play at my leisure. But for a child or someone less savvy who wants to break free of the modern miasma of gaming towards something simpler, this would be awesome. No BS, no license checks, no choosing a Proton runtime. Just plug in a game, turn on the system, and go.
Really interested to see where this goes and wish the team the absolute best!
A 64GB SD card is $4 and should fit the majority of games that fit the "no DRM" requirement. This product is not for me but i would just standardize on 64GB cards. Should be big and fast enough for most example games they show.
For the full old school console experience you shouldn't have hundreds of games lying around anyway, most people had less than a dozen games per console.
vunderba|6 months ago
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
Yokolos|6 months ago
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.
Saline9515|6 months ago
vanderZwan|6 months ago
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.
Chris2048|6 months ago
lproven|6 months ago
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.
mulletbum|6 months ago
carra|6 months ago
philistine|6 months ago
cornstalks|6 months ago
> 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.
tonyhart7|6 months ago
[deleted]
ninetyninenine|6 months ago
[deleted]
hmry|6 months ago
imiric|6 months ago
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.
brabel|6 months ago
ZaoLahma|6 months ago
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.
voidfunc|6 months ago
I haven't touched a CD since the late 2000s.
npteljes|6 months ago
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.
hulitu|6 months ago
And looong download/update times (Delta Force - almost 4 hours). Makes a ZX Spectrum which loaded games from cassettes pale in comparison.
reactordev|6 months ago
carra|6 months ago
alex_suzuki|6 months ago
ofrzeta|6 months ago
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.
ndriscoll|6 months ago
Timpy|6 months ago
112233|6 months ago
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.
carra|6 months ago
robbbbbbbbbbbb|6 months ago
Those + some SD cards and a spare evening for setup makes this a really tempting £400 project.
SomeoneOnTheWeb|6 months ago
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.
Waterluvian|6 months ago
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.
cornholio|6 months ago
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.
serf|6 months ago
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..)
darkwater|6 months ago
Dead_Lemon|6 months ago
judge123|6 months ago
bondarchuk|6 months ago
morsch|6 months ago
reactordev|6 months ago
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.
catapart|6 months ago
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.
ranger_danger|6 months ago
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.
carra|6 months ago
Pfhortune|6 months ago
Really interested to see where this goes and wish the team the absolute best!
tantalor|6 months ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ouya
unknown|6 months ago
[deleted]
ThinkBeat|6 months ago
"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.
asadm|6 months ago
Ericson2314|6 months ago
snvzz|6 months ago
coolcoder613|6 months ago
flumpcakes|6 months ago
larodi|6 months ago
jsilence|6 months ago
therealfiona|6 months ago
BlackLotus89|6 months ago
[deleted]
yourusername|6 months ago
paintbox|6 months ago