Game companies might not like physical media much anymore, but gamers sure do. There’s nothing like pawing over your collection to find what to play, and inserting a cartridge with a satisfying click before sitting down to an old-school game like — wait, Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah, that wasn’t released on cartridge, but that didn’t stop [Jibril-sama] over on Reddit. The cartridges are 3D printed — stls on makeworld only, as of this writing — and contain old 2.5″ SSDs that [Jabril] was able to pick up in bulk.
This larger base seems ideal for building into a PC console, but either would work.
Inside the base unit is a simple USB3-SATA adapter that hooks to [Jabril]’s gaming PC. There are two versions of the base unit: a simple vertical unit, and a horizontal one with some springs to give a satisfying grip.
On each disk is a launch script that is vetted by a program on the PC that autolaunches only the cartridges you’ve told it to trust, which is a level of security we can appreciate. [Jabril-sama] has kindly made that available under the MIT license on GitHub.
We don’t know how much life is left in these cheap drives, but they should last a while if the only write is the odd save file. Hopefully [Jabril-sama] is cycling through his games fairly often, as SSDs are only non-volatile storage if your time horizon is short enough.
Thanks to [iliis] for the tip! Remember, if you use our tips line to share what you find, you’re not doomscrolling, you’re doing a public service.