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.
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.
Can I blow its ports to make sure it’ll load? If yes, then sold!
This looks awesome, and I definitely have a collection of old smallish SSDs looking for a new purpose… but the prospect of running a modern ~70GB game over a 6Gbps SATA III connection is not giving me an excited feeling. It’d be fine if I had enough RAM to load significant portions of the game, but…
SATA III is fast enough to transfer the whole 70GB in less than 2 minutes. The game should need only a small fraction of that at any time.
Sure, but in practice you don’t load the whole game’s assets, you stream them. And with CP77 for example, you get lots of horrible LoD-popping if that stream isn’t fast and low latency.
The game needs a couple of GB of new assets every time you move between areas or encounter new content.
I’m a little confused by the process. After flipping through the repo, I think what it does is just check for a trusted drive then run a script from the inserted drive that launches the game. The game doesn’t actually have be on the inserted drive, but it can be is my understanding.
That makes the situation make a bit more sense to me, but if that is the case, why not do this with old USB flash (thumb) drives? You can get them for less money (or free), and the form factor is rather unimportant because if you’re designing 3D printable enclosures, you can make them however you want. The tendency for SSDs to lose data over time when unpowered seems like huge oversight.
a huge oversight.
Any SSD aught to be fast enough at that “random” access read for it to not matter very much if at all – when spinning rust is rarely slow enough to matter and that has significant seek times any SSD should do. Maybe if you are trying to play with heaps of extra HD textures in 8K ultra setting it would be too slow by enough to really really matter, but if you are trying to push the graphics so far you almost certainly have the system RAM even in this economy to cache much of it.
I’d be more concerned with USB chain being flakey than the SSD.
If you’re using a desktop, you can always put an eSATA card in it and use an eSATA dock for the SSD.
You should set these up with the steam library system so that they just show up automatically in there. There should be a way to autoadd libraries?
Not an official way, but there are programs that still work around it on Linux. Unsure if it’s possible on Windows. Also, Steam doesn’t always immediatly recognize new drives when plugging them in, but again, there are programs that can fix that.
Loving how many designs for physical cartridges are showing up. Makes gaming (and other things) surprisingly fun again.
juuuust wish I could actually download this. Sad that the community is starting to standardize on a site that mandates a login just to download, then bans people for how they exist.
What site are you referring to? The STL hosting site?
Looks a little like an 8-Track cartridge – maybe can get some music stored on some of them with a similar vibe. Cool nonetheless.
the design is arbitrary and can look like anything but when i showed this project to others — before it was an article on had — we all more or less agreed that while we would actually consider something like this for our steam decks that it was still ugly as sin.
Now if only U.2 trimode cages and controllers were more common and affordable alongside pcie hotplug in consumer boards, that would make this fun and great setup even more amazing.
What about ExpressCard? The real PCIe interface, and not cards that are really just USB under the hood…
U.3 would be fairly similar, it depends on the controller being used, just like Expresscard. Main difference being the U.3 supports Sata, SAS, and PCIe up to 5.0×4, but not USB which ExpressCard has support for.