Old SSDs Find New Life as Game Cartridges

Game companies might not like physical media much anymore, but gamers sure do. Thereβs nothing like pawing over your collection to find what to play, and inserting a cartridge with a satisfying click before sitting down to an old-school game like β wait, Cyberpunk 2077? Yeah, that wasnβt released on cartridge, but that didnβt stop [Jibril-sama] over on Reddit. The cartridges are 3D printed β stls on makeworld only, as of this writing β and contain old 2.5β³ SSDs that [Jabril] was able to pick up in bulk.

Inside the base unit is a simple USB3-SATA adapter that hooks to [Jabril]βs gaming PC. There are two versions of the base unit: a simple vertical unit, and a horizontal one with some springs to give a satisfying grip.
On each disk is a launch script that is vetted by a program on the PC that autolaunches only the cartridges youβve told it to trust, which is a level of security we can appreciate. [Jabril-sama] has kindly made that available under the MIT license on GitHub.
We donβt know how much life is left in these cheap drives, but they should last a while if the only write is the odd save file. Hopefully [Jabril-sama] is cycling through his games fairly often, as SSDs are only non-volatile storage if your time horizon is short enough.
Thanks to [iliis] for the tip! Remember, if you use our tips line to share what you find, youβre not doomscrolling, youβre doing a public service.
