Reject volatile tradition, embrace modernity: ~/Games/ROMs/Nintendo 64/
Also use a shitty CRT shader that mimics a broken black-and-white TV from the 50s for more tradition.
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2026
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Lug around an ancient, bulky, heavy, obsolete, actual progressive scan CRT for maximum tradition. Bonus points if it has a built-in VCR.
built-in VCR
You managed to make it worse with one simple feature!
Hey though, I found out an INCREDIBLY fun feature with those TV-VCR combos. It was really easy to record gameplay! :D
I thought that was pretty neat at the time. Got to show my friends some fun console gaming antics before it was easy to capture / upload / send such things.
That just sounds like a capture card. Nice that you figured out it could record more than TV shows!
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Reject volatile tradition, embrace modernity: ~/Games/ROMs/Nintendo 64/
Yeah, lol. I don't need a huge stack of game discs and cartridges when I can have a folder full of roms on my computer, with good backups.
Best of both worlds, really. The convenience of not needing physical media, the permanence of having it (maybe even more permanence, since files with good backups should last longer than physical media would -- potentially forever).
And then there's the extra bonus of emulation allowing me to make various improvements -- running old games in widescreen with higher resolution, for example. Or using AR/Gecko codes to implement some quality of life features in old games that could really use them.
Oddly enough, I read this while wearing an N64 shirt.
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Actually, in the case of discs, it can.
Say it with me everyone, "Optical media bad!"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_degradation
Unfortunately, playing a burned copy requires modifying your hardware.
Most of you are probably too young to remember, but back then, the fact that Sony chose optical media and implemented DRM on the PlayStation was very controversial to people who knew the implications of those decisions. Unfortunately, that number of people was, and remains, very small.
Every disc copy of every game is a ticking time bomb, and the only way to defuse it is to make an unauthorized backup copy, then hack your PS1 to play the copy. There is no way to slow, prevent, or reverse the eventual decay of the data on the original disc.
This ignores the underlying issue this post was about. Games being sold on physical media will likely last longer than games sold as digital downloads.
If you store a professionally pressed optical disc in an environment with good temperature control and low humidity, it may last 50 - 100 years. Only about 10% of pressed optical discs fail in under 25 years. Meanwhile, companies like Sony will take down their storefronts with little to no thought.
Yes, for backups, you're better off storing bin/cue files than trusting a cheap burned disc that will only last 1-5 years. But games getting sold with physical disc gives people the ability to rip them.
Meanwhile, companies like Sony will take down their storefronts with little to no thought.
Goodbye Vita store, hello Henkaku and PKGJ.
If you store a professionally pressed optical disc in an environment with good temperature control and low humidity, it may last 50 - 100 years.
Reduce that to like 1 to maybe 5 years if it was being played in an original X-Box with a Thompson disc drive. (If ya know, ya know.)
I'm still salty about being so careful with all my discs and watching Crimson Skies and Halo: Combat Evolved load backwards before showing "Disc Read Error."
Games being sold on physical media will likely last longer than games sold as digital downloads.
Maybe the reason physical seems to outlast digital is because Nintendo, Sony, and Microsoft are the companies most known for switching from physical to digital. These companies are greedy and anti-consumer and they seemed to have made the switch in order to push more anti-consumer practices.
There's no natural reason a physical game should outlast a digital one. The reason they do entirely comes from corporate greed. My steam library contains a copy of Gazillionare, a game released in 1994. A game still available for sale on Steam and that runs on my Linux box today. Games sold as digital downloads aren't inherently bad. The underlying issue is corporate greed.
Sure. I wouldn't be working as part of the Retro eXo team if it wasn't possible to preserve games digitally. But physical discs do something beyond not being possible to delist - they provide a snapshot of what the game was when it was pressed, which cannot be altered. Say a company is licensed to include music in a game for x number of years. After that time runs out, they may strip the content from the game. Another example is how companies like GOG strip out drivers and setup files from the retro games they put online. They rip content out of games as bad as dialup era websites like Home of the Underdogs did. A game might only be left with a single EGA video mode and Sound Blaster audio. Forget stuff like MT-32 - GOG always removes the files necessary for it to work. In the end, we can't really trust the companies to keep anything online.
This is true of every storage medium. Some bit rot faster than others, but eventually entropy comes for us all.
The important thing is the ability to make backups.
Apparently this is an issue with modern flash carts too. If you don’t boot your 3DS games once in a while they will corrupt.
Eh, that's just the shitty organic medium they cheap out with. Metal dyes (M-Disc Blurays are 100GB good for 100 years, fine even for modern games) are great, shame they're artificially expensive.
Newer glass or quartz optical discs with femtosecond lasers are good for 360TB for 100K years (claimed) in a similar footprint. See also M$ sitting on 'Project Silica' for most of a decade.
Shame corpos don't want the CD burning revolution to happen again, just imagine what sneakernet would be like if you could fit all of Netflix in the palm of your hand burned on a USB peripheral.
There is no way to slow, prevent, or reverse the eventual decay of the data on the original disc.
Maybe no way to prevent it or reverse it, but I bet there are ways that could slow it. Preventing exposure to light -- especially sunlight -- probably helps. And if you kept them at very low temperatures (like in a freezer), that would probably help as well. Pretty much every physical/chemical process slows down at lower temperatures.
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Yarrrrrr, I don’t mind digital distribution! Ahoy mateys!
UNLIMITED POWER
CDs and carts are worthless if the game is unplayable without a Day 1 patch.
Or being forced to sign into your Epic/EA/Blizzard/whatever account before you can play offline story-mode.
I can't imagine if Goldeneye on the N64 was unplayable on day one. Modern standards are six feet under.
Actually it can, if they disable it. Bring back offline gaming.
Physical games can unfortunately degrade. To be clear, I'm a huge proponent of physical games. I say this only to highlight the important of emulating your games, as well.
Again this bullshit.
Old consoles did not have mechanisms to prevent you from playing games. Mainly because internet was not widespread enough for hardware vendors to make it mandatory.
A game(or the OS of the console/PC that runs it) that is 100% on your physical media can still require you to connect online, login with an account and all other kinds of bullshit. It was done in CD/DVD distributed games in the 00s. There are of course games released on physical media today that are not complete and require release date updates to run.
A modern unhacked console could refuse to run a game from disk if you don't connect/login to get permission from mommy Nintendo/Sony/MS. Them not doing so is not a limitation imposed on them by physical media. It's a policy, hopefully forced upon them by law.
TLDR: We don't need physical media, we need an unrevocable right to be able to play games we purchased with effective enforcement. Additionally we should have a right to modify the games as needed to be playable in other hardware/OS since we can't expect original hardware to last forever.
I feel like we should strive for both, the actual ownership and the physical media
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Discs and cartridges are just more eventual plastic trash for a planet that is drowning in it. They also do nothing to address the real problem because the terms were always the same, even with these. The real change needs to happen at the consumer rights level and require DRM free digital downloads. Hard drives aren't eternal either, but they can be backed up and replaced as needed to preserve a collection. Without illegal intervention, discs/cartridges keep the media stuck where it is until it breaks.
Good luck getting any of those classics at an affordable price, have you seen what the market looks like?
Good luck getting any of those classics at an affordable price, have you seen what the market looks like?
Good luck getting Switch 2 games at an affordable price.
Sure, the old games used to be cheaper than they are now, but most of them were more expensive back then (accounting for inflation)...and they're generally cheaper than current-gen console games.
...and they're generally cheaper than current-gen console games.
The wild thing is that a lot of in-demand titles aren't. I lost my original copy of Boktai 1 a while back and I'd love to replace it, but take a look for yourself how much that one goes for.
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The worst part is you can't return the game after opening the box.
So far I haven't seen any 'no cartridge' disclosures on Switch games, but surely they're there... surely?
In a way we've come full circle.
Personally I'm working on a way to make cheap SSDs into cartridges for pc gaming. My goal is to build all the required directories and software onto the SSD so as long as you have the framework on the pc you can just plug it in and it will launch the game.
Tb drives may cost too much but crap 200gb drives are a dime a dozen.
Would USB thumb drives be too slow?
I was always told they'd be but honestly ive never had an issue with usb 3 or SD card. I'm doing SSD sata gives a really satisfying cartride feel.
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Have you already checked out kazeta.org? Sounds a bit like what you are trying to achieve.
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Sounds promising
It's honestly prety great, my biggest issue is that I'm absolutely not a programmer so my current abilities are limited to what I can cobble together with settings and system configurations.
I'm working on learning though, eventually I'll get it.
I have faith in you!
If gamers are dumb enough to pay these companies to continue with worse and worse habits, fine by me. Gaming money and consoles are 100% disposable income.
I play board games on my platform. My platform is the dining room table.
Sorry, I can't hear your complaint over Steams per game sales outstripping all other consoles
That was part of the reason why I started using cassette tapes again. No internet no subscription.
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