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

121–130 of 164 posts

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

#121

Post by bondarchuk »

flufluflufluffy wrote: post #109
cornstalks wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 think it’s confusing particularly because it pushes the whole “zero setup” thing, then when you go to the docs to figure out what the heck the thing is it describes a long list of things one would need to do in order to set up a working physical machine running Kazeta and the cartridges etc... The website itself reads like it’s an app you can just download and run, while at the same time hinting that you’re gonna n…

The 2nd and 3rd words on the page are "operating system", it is obvious that an operating system must be installed before it can be used.

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

#122

Post by bondarchuk »

judge123 wrote: post #18

It's less about nostalgia for the 90s and more about a cure for the modern "too much choice" anxiety.

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.

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

#123

Post by integralid »

mystraline wrote: post #100
unixhero wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Scarcity has it virtues, too. I would even wager to say; Without it, we're doomed.

We have enough food production to feed 30 billion people, and throw away massive amounts. 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 bi…

But we, at least in western society, want much more than just food. Even assuming that zero food waste is realistic.

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.

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

#124

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

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.

conversely: never assume the writing is for everybody :)

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

#125

Post by vunderba »

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…

I grew up in that era.

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.)

- [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LJN

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

#126

Post by lproven »

bondarchuk wrote: post #120
ramon156 wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well of course I know. But I never owned a games console in the 1990s, I've never played a game on a 1990s console, so I have no clue what aspect of the experience is being captured or not.

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

#127

Post by lproven »

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…

Great! Thank you. That's much more helpful.

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

#128

Post by belthesar »

Yokolos wrote: post #81
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…

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 c…

“But why” is an ever present question on Hacker News, with the announcement of Dropbox being rebutted with “But why, we have FTP”.

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.

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

#129

Post by Lalabadie »

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.

Phoniebox is another popular implementation of the idea: https://phoniebox.de

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

#130

Post by ZenoArrow »

tonyhart7 wrote: post #117
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]

It's not nostalgia for a game, it's wanting to get back to plug-and-play gaming experiences.

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.

Post reply on HN