A PC gamer going by the handle Jibril-sama recently posted on the pcmasterrace subreddit about a project that they dub the Steam Game Cartridge system, and it is like one of the more impressive and awesome uses of storage devices. Well, we think it’s awesome, at least.
Here’s what they did: Jibril-sama said in their post that they managed to score a handful of 2.5-inch SSDs for cheap and decided to make a game cartridge system with them. “Games are actually on those SSDs with a script to auto-navigate Steam to the game’s page. Auto-starting the game right away is also possible,” they say.
The SSDs Jibril-sama got were of the 128GB capacities, they said, and says that they scored them for €7 (~RM32) a pop. That’s very decent, given the current prices of storage and memory components in the market, and worst, those prices are still skyrocketing.
The real genius here is how they’ve made it so that Steam will automatically detect the game the very second a Steam Game Cartridge is inserted. Steam is notoriously fussy whenever a game in a user’s library is moved about, either within the same PC or when a PC gamer has gotten themselves an entirely new system.
“All it needs is a systemd template to check for a script on the SSD and launch it. And a udev rule to trigger the system,” Jibril-sama said. “So basically: Plug in SSD -> udev rule sees the event -> triggers the systemd daemon -> systemd daemon looks into the SSD and finds the script -> execute the script.”
Jibril-sama’s Steam Game Cartridge system has garnered overwhelming interest from the other Redditors, some saying that they wish to see the system extended to include GOG game libraries. Others did voice concern about how the system handles multi-gigabyte updates, to which Jibril-sama indicated that that wasn’t his priority, as he didn’t use the cartridges for “live service” titles and more for “games that I want to replay once in a while. In the event an update is required for the game installed on the “Game Cartridge”, they’ll let Steam “handle the update and wait a bit before I can play”.
(Source: Tom’s Hardware, Reddit)