Alesh Slovak's Kazeta Turns Mini-PCs Into '90s Throwback "Cartridge"-Based Games Consoles

Vintage gaming enthusiast Alesh Slovak is hoping to take people back to the '90s with Kazeta, an operating system designed to turn SD cards into near-instant-loading game cartridges — built primarily with the current crop of low-cost surprisingly-powerful small form factor PCs in mind.

"Kazeta [is] an operating system that brings the console gaming experience of the '90s to modern PC hardware and games: insert cart, power on, play," Slovak writes of the project. "Insert a game cart, press power, and you're gaming instantly. Relive that nostalgic golden age where nothing stood between you and the games you love. Transform your digital library into something tangible and permanent. Create physical game carts from your DRM-free titles and build a collection that you can play forever. Say goodbye to the complexities of modern gaming and just play."

Kazeta itself is built atop Arch Linux and Valve's Gamescope tool, targeting 64-bit x86 devices with 4GB or more of memory, 32GB or more storage, and an AMD Radeon RX 400 Series or NVIDIA GTX 1600 Series or newer graphics processor. "Intel GPUs released since 2017 may work," Slovak notes, "but have poor game compatibility."

The idea is simple: SD cards are formatted for Linux then a game of the user's choice is copied onto them. A "Kazeta Info" file is added, along with an icon, which includes the name of the game, options for Gamescope's renderer, and a choice of Linux, Windows, or "none" runtimes — a Kazeta-specific concept that packs the umu launcher and Steam runtime, plus the GE Proton compatibility layer for Windows games, into a single disk image included on the SD card — while the "none" option runs the games natively against the system libraries.

"When the system boots, all storage media is mounted automatically," Slovak explains. "The system then checks all storage media for the existence of a file with the .kzi (Kazeta Info) extension. This file defines how to launch a game. If this file is found, it is parsed and the game is started using Gamescope. If not found, the 'BIOS' menu is started instead."

"The cartridge itself is never written to," Slovak continues. "This is to ensure the game data remains pristine, and to prevent wear on the storage media itself. To capture any changes, such as game save data, a writable overlay filesystem is applied on top of the cartridge. The contents of the overlay/save data are stored on the systems internal storage."

More information on the project is available, alongside links to download it, on the Kazeta website; source code is published on GitHub under the permissive MIT license.