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.
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?
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.
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
What does physical media actually give you?
A shortcut to actual ownership
If the physical media game requires a server connection, how is it ownership, exactly? The corpo can still effectively take away the product from you by shutting down the servers. Or banning you.
“Plastic stuff” doesn’t give you rights. Laws give you rights.
We actively avoid those games that require server connections
So what makes a game on a disk that does not require internet connection to run/activate better than a game distributed GOG style where once you get the game it also no longer requires an internet connection?
Obviously the GOG-style distro is the best, closely followed by your game-on-disc. Sony Playstation does not give you games GOG-style and will stop disc games by January 2028.
