Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

kazeta.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 164 posts

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#111

Post by fragmede »

cout wrote: post #51
vanderZwan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Is it still possible to buy smaller SD cards in bulk, maybe 8mb or 16mb? The smallest I could find was 128mb for about the same price as a 2gb card. While I like the idea of physically separate cards for each game, at $10 per card it seems economically limiting.

Given storage sizes, the cartridge is symbolic. Use NFC tags and a reader and just load the appropriate ROM off disk.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#112

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

deadbabe wrote: post #38
vanderZwan wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It’s more romantic to have each game on individual cards that you can touch and feel rather than cramming a bunch of them onto one card. 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 p…

We had MS-DOS shovelware shareware on CD-ROM back in the day. The cartrige thing is a specific nostalgia thing not everyone experienced.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#113

Post by MithrilTuxedo »

ramon156 wrote: post #95
mulletbum wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, this is not targeted at you. I know exactly what a 1990s gaming experience is like and xbox is the console that killed it completely.

Never assume the reader knows what you're talking about, that's bad writing.

It really depends on the context.

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.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#114

Post by allenu »

ndriscoll wrote: post #84
ofrzeta wrote: post #65

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 -…

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.

I remember seeing a blog post about this exact thing using nice little square NFC cards with the album covers on them. For anybody interested: https://hicks.design/journal/moo-card-player

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#115

Post by ofrzeta »

ndriscoll wrote: post #99
ofrzeta wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are right that this is probably the more reasonable thing to do. I was just thinking that 1) I want to use full-size cards for better haptic and 2) have the actual data stored on the media. For instance when you are in the car with your playback box and the SD card you can listen without a network connection. But I concede that I am stubborn and this will probably be a dead end :)

You still don't need a network connection. Put a drive or SD card with all of your music in the player itself. You could put several hundred CDs worth of music in FLAC on a device for like $20, or up to like 4,000 CDs with a 2TB card (or 16,000 with an 8 TB drive), so probably more than anyone could reasonably own (or manage for a physical collection). Pennies of amortized storage cost per album even if you have mult…

That's a neat trick.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#116

Post by dan353hehe »

cornstalks wrote: post #101
lproven wrote: post #70

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…

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…

I got a patch:

  @@ -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.
Fixed it.

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.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#117

Post by tonyhart7 »

lproven wrote: post #70

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…

[flagged]

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#118

Post by wolrah »

Chris2048 wrote: post #96
vunderba wrote: post #15

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…

You could also just have the games already on the console/pc and the cartridge is just a "key" needed to play it?

This is the idea behind Zaparoo (https://zaparoo.org/) which uses NFC tags that can be put in to your preferred form (card, cartridge, token, etc.) and used to select and launch games. It was originally built for use with the MiSTer FPGA hardware emulation platform but has since expanded to support a variety of software emulation platforms and apparently even actual C64s via a flash cart.

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#119

Post by sgbeal »

pezezin wrote: post #75
sgbeal wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Unlike ROM cartridges, which AFAICT died with the GBA in 2008. Look up the Gameboy 3DS :).

3DS carts are actually NAND flash, and if you don't play them for long enough the may lost all the data! https://www.nintendolife.com/news/2021/05/psa_yes_your_ds_an...

> 3DS carts are actually NAND flash

TIL. Thank you :).

Re: Kazeta: An operating system that brings the console gaming experience of 90s

#120

Post by bondarchuk »

ramon156 wrote: post #95
mulletbum wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have to say, this is not targeted at you. I know exactly what a 1990s gaming experience is like and xbox is the console that killed it completely.

Never assume the reader knows what you're talking about, that's bad writing.

Could one be forgiven for assuming on the internet that people know what "console gaming" or "the 1990s" are? I expected the worst reading this comment thread before clicking TFA but it's really very straightforward.
Post reply on HN