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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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.

Reject rentals, embrace ownership

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.

UNLIMITED POWER

Yarrrrrr, I don’t mind digital distribution! Ahoy mateys!

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.

That was part of the reason why I started using cassette tapes again. No internet no subscription.

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.

I was first excited for digital to replace vinyl and then for magnetic media mostly biting the dust, then latter for optical burning (heh) out. Anyone wanting to go back to the old days didn't have to actual hassle with old tech.

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.

Would USB thumb drives be too slow?

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.

Can I get Starfox on VCR?

Actually it can, if they disable it. Bring back offline gaming.

Sounds promising

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.

Good luck getting any of those classics at an affordable price, have you seen what the market looks like?

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.

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.

Depends on how it loads the data. Most executables will load completely into the RAM during launch. But some parts of the game are only loaded when needed, like graphics.
Conversely though, most old games are small, and were designed around slow read write speeds. So most modern usb drives are fully up to the task, for older games.

Plugging something into a sata port usually requires taking the PC apart and restarting it doesn't it?

I can't imagine if Goldeneye on the N64 was unplayable on day one. Modern standards are six feet under.

In a way we've come full circle.

Have you already checked out kazeta.org? Sounds a bit like what you are trying to achieve.

Oddly enough, I read this while wearing an N64 shirt.

This reminds me to test and list the chipped PS2 in my garage for sale.

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.

Hence why I said "generally"! I know some games have outrageously crazy prices. But I'd genuinely wager that the majority of retro game titles are cheaper now than they were when they launched, adjusting for inflation.

At least if you forgo the box/paper. I think strong arguments in either direction could be made about whether that's a fair comparison.

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.

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."

Although controversial here, but in the age of AI, one can create engine replacements for games with DRM and/or behind obnoxious launchers to play them fully offline.
For example, I am a huge fan of Anno 1602, but I was disappointed by the History Edition from Ubisoft. LLMs helped me a lot to build a new engine from scratch in quite a short time with all the enhancements, qol and features I would have loved to see in the History Edition without all of the Ubisoft crap. It runs super stable and smooth (especially multiplayer).
This is the version my friends and I are playing now.

That just sounds like a capture card. Nice that you figured out it could record more than TV shows!

Unfortunately it's the rich who run those models. Maybe if it was pirated?

I understand your sentiment and it is fair if you don’t want to use these models at all.
I have a copy of the original from GOG, the setup is saved on my hard drive and server, so there is that. I don’t care what Ubisoft is doing with the HE of Anno 1602.
If you or anyone else is interested in trying out my engine replacement, it is fully open source under GPL-3: GitHub.com/x4rd4s/open1602

I will be uploading release builds soon, but you can already build it yourself.

By it I meant the model :)

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

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?

What does physical media actually give you?

I play board games on my platform. My platform is the dining room table.