Posted by subliminalpanda 9/2/2025
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 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.
Another example is within engineering with scarce inputs. The result is often much more ingenious than when the inventor or engineer has no limitations whatsoever.
Trying to figure out what to read or what to watch when everything in the knoen universe is at your fingertips, is another challenge where scarcity helps. I do like where we have ended up, regarding this though :).
And so on...
We have plenty of land and housing could be inexpensive or free for all.
Sunlight, wind, and tidal is literally 1kW/1m^2 free energy.
Pirates already can watch anything, listen to petabytes of music, access nearly every book including academic papers.
We really could be living in post-scarcity world. But its the oligarchs and billionaires who want to keep the spoils for themselves. And in the USA alone 8 billionaires own as much resources as the bottom 60% does.
Simply put, material scarcity is a fucked mindset. And we could grow past that - in fact I think we have to.
Land is pretty cheap, except when you want to live in a city, especially big. Which is what most people want.
Sunlight is free, solar panel manufacturing and maintenance is not.
Pirates watch things for free, but the people that pay fund the production.
Most expensive things are expensive because they require labor, which is expensive. And people tend to actually want expensive things, even if they don't strictly require them - either as a status symbol, or just to make their life easier (a dishwasher or a vacuum cleaner is not required to live, but most people can't imagine living without one).
Simply put, I think you either greatly oversimplify the problem and handwave the problem by just blaming "billionaires" for everything, or I don't understand your point properly.
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.
I would assume the quality of those things is not great, but the design of this system means they're basically read-only so that should hopefully help them survive longer.
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.
Same goes for the Atari 2600, with the difference that the game selection was made with physical switches instead of a menu screen.
For me, the practicality of gaming doesn't get in the way of the same enjoyment that you described feeling. I love it that I can have my favorites and current ones loaded in a single console, which I hold exactly as dearly as you described with the game cartridge. To me, most games are experiences though, and therefore I have no use for the media, packaging etc after I have experienced it. When I want to refresh my memories, I rather look at the screenshots and videos I took of the game, rather than the box or cartridge, as the media I created is much more personal.
And part of that magic was the UNIQUENESS of the "cartridge", be it a Genesis cart, an NES cart, or even a PC big box. Having them displayed in your bedroom on a shelf was part of that experience. Personally I think you lose a lot of this magic with a tiny and somewhat generic looking SD card.
Also let's not pretend that there wasn't a metric F###-ton of garbage day games [1] back in the day. The only difference is the barrier to entry to game development and production is significantly lower - so there's just orders of magnitude more.
There are still plenty of VERY high quality games released today - you're either not looking for them or deliberately choosing to ignore them. (Spelunky, Shovel Knight, BG3, Tomb Raider 2013, Doom Eternal, Cuphead, Ori and the Will of the Wisps, etc.)
Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.
>Having a tangible thing somehow makes it mean more, think about picking out a record or CD to play and leaving it to play as opposed to scrolling through infinite music to choose what to play.
The same could be said in reverse. Just to highlight that this is a subjective experience, and not an objective truth. "Having an infinite pool of music somehow makes in mean more, as opposed to the dusty collection that you happen to have at home".
On the other, there's something deeply "unmagical" about loading up a huge menu of games. Even if they're organized in some way (console, genre, studio, whatever), even if you include box art and info, it's simply not the same experience. Most retro gaming channels I watch on YouTube talk about this phenomenon--mostly in the context of "why do you have shelves full of games".
Different people will think different things about this. I have a 77 square meter home (~830ft2) and like, I'm not fitting all the games I ever bought in this place, let alone all the albums, books, etc. I have flash carts, hard drives, and a kindle keyboard v3. I kind of chalk it up to "life is a beautiful struggle". Friction is good, actually, it enriches life, and these kinds of little agonies are fun to just discuss and find common experience over.
Although, to be honest, if the digital world didn't exist at all, I'm sure I'd manage to have a good time all the time. It's just that now that it exists, I prefer it more - streaming over physical media for example.
I think that what you really want is going back to pre-internet times when access to media was limited, so every single piece of media had value. You had one casette, you'd listen to it back to back because there was nothing else. Nowadays media feel meaningless not because they're not put on physical plastic, but because you have infinite access to it at all times. Some people argue that you could try to restrict yourself to some specific subset, but deep down you'll always know it's just a theatre.
Since I accepted the fact that I hate most of humanity and 99% of commercial products are slop, I started valuing things much more. The rush of "wow I found something that isn't slop" mimics the old feeling of getting a new disc.
There's already every single mainstream platform offering what you want. This is clearly a niche product serving a niche usecase: recreating the experience of physical carts like an SNES or a PS2 or a Gameboy. Some people, necessarily a minority, enjoy this. Why are you so angry? I don't get it.
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.
Everyone's bandwidth would be saturated if no one assumed their reader knew what they were talking about, but assumption is a form of lossy compression that allows both miscommunication and misunderstanding.
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.
@@ -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.
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.
1. buy your second game (130 DEM in 1995 / 109 EUR inflation-adjusted for 2025 / all the money you saved for weeks age-adjusted) for your new Sega Saturn.
2. notice it doesn't load on your console
3. be told that you have to send everything in to have it repaired (in retrospect find out that Saturns often had faulty CD drives)
4. wait three weeks (an eternity age-adjusted for a 12 year-old) until you get your console returned
5. finally play
With consoles in the 70s/80s/90s, when you put a game into the console and turned it on, you launched directly into the game. That immediacy is lost when you end up with endless software updates and having to launch games from a menu. If you didn't live through that time I can understand why you aren't nostalgic for it.
are you ignoring the fact that physical games sales literally in spiral downward trend for decades???
people not buy it anymore, that's why company didnt produce that any of that
You may argue that company has a hand with it but its just down to culture, japan still buying an cd/blueray for physical music and games etc
their industry still thriving despite so called "old tech", people choose to do that
If you don't understand something then it is not OK to blame the mental faculties of the author.
Yes you did.
>> maybe you got mixed up and you’re referring to your kid from a long time ago
Accusing me of senility is not merely ad hominem it's also extremely rude.
Learn to do better.
You need to learn to talk with basic courtesy. It’s not an assumption when I say this: you have issues.
Talk about projection. Sorry, but this kind of gaslighting just pisses me off. You're entire comment history is that of being incredible obnoxious to everyone and and its screaming "I have issues". Then you write that? What an arse.
Can you not stalk me and not insult me to my face? also please mind your own business.
> I wouldn't be surprised if you do shit like this on the regular.
I certainly do, and I recommend everyone to do it. It's quick and requires much less time and effort than to accidentally be drawn in to a barren discussion with - in a broad sense - the proverbial village idiot.
More like how someone can live in such a state where they need to do this. Do you not have a life? Don't answer. This conversation is over.
Judging by your comment history I'd look inwards!
I do. Commenting and having contrarian opinions isn't the same as spending time going onto other peoples threads to start shit and stalking them. Unfortunately, you don't have much going on, that's why you can do this. It's the truth and you know it. Good day sir.
Snark aside, I find it amusing with you weirdly domineering types that you just can't stop trying to gaslight. It seems compulsive; "you don't have much going on, that's why you can do this. It's the truth and you know it.". Like, come on, the eyeroll got so far back I got worried it might get stuck.
> Don't answer. This conversation is over.
> Time for you to leave.
It's fittingly delusional, but very amusing, that you think you can command people around on an online discussion board.
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.
Look up the Gameboy 3DS :).
https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/05/psa_yes_your_ds_an...
TIL. Thank you :).
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.
To rephrase what I originally wanted to say: "Micro-transactions are accepted, but far from universal. Gaming got huge - even if you discard every game that has micro-transactions, the catalogue is still vast and impressive."
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
EDIT: this Reddit thread says it downloads the files. "All the audio files live in the cloud and it gets downloaded to your Yoto when you insert a card in the speaker. This means that you will need WiFi the first time you listen to a card, but should be fine without the next time you want to play the same."
https://www.reddit.com/r/YotoPlayer/comments/1grrl9u/just_le...
The cards have an NFC chip: https://support.yotoplay.com/en-US/what-are-yoto-cards-made-...
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.
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..)