Kazeta is a new OS by the creator of ChimeraOS. You might have seen some news on it in the last few days, or at least some posts on social media. Its not trying to be the next big gaming platform, it’s more like a little love letter to the old style of gaming. Instead of all those menus, online accounts, and updates, it takes things back to the basics: stick in a ‘cartridge’ you make yourself, turn on the system, and play. That’s it! No fuss, just the game you wanted to play.
What makes it extra fun is that the ‘cartridges’ are really just SD cards you load games onto. Label them, stack them, swap them around, it’s built to make you feel like you’re back in the ’90s, digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like. A tactile vision of when games came on actual carts…well, kind of.
Kazeta is a neat mix of nostalgia and practicality, especially if you’re tired of modern gaming feeling like a chore.
I got the chance to chat with Alkazar, the dev behind Kazeta, and he shared some great insights into building the OS. This feature pulls together our conversation and what makes the project so unique.
digging through a shoebox of game carts. For someone who wasn’t alive for that era of gaming (not even close, honestly), it’s a neat little glimpse of what it was like.
As someone who was alive for gaming in the 80s and 90s, it was nothing like that at all. Unless you were very rich, most people would have less than 10 games for the one console they had. It would be a small stack by the side of the console, next to the controllers. Games were usually around $70 depending on the game, which is like $160 in today’s money. NES games were cheaper, especially once the SNES was released. So people did wind up collecting NES games (2nd hand) once the SNES released. The NES moved to the oldest kid bedroom, with the SNES taking the place of the one console in the living room. They might have a shoebox of older games at some point.
We did play a lot of games tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, the other games people had varied. Downside was, the easiest ones to borrow were often the ones that weren’t any good. We all know that one kid that had the Star Wars SNES game and hated it, but you’d only very sparingly get a new game, so you were stuck with it.
Another thing we did was rent a lot of games, you would go to the rental place and they would have so many games, it would blow your mind. They’d have posters up, often large set pieces for some games and movies. It was like kid heaven. Then you’d have about 10 mins to figure out which game to rent, otherwise your dad would get annoyed and tell you to get a move on. People even rented the SNES when it was just released for a weekend, so they would know if it was any good before buying it for the family. It was a big purchase, so you’d better make it worth it.
Man, I miss biking over to friends’ houses to try their different consoles and games, and trading cartridges. Steam is extremely convenient, but that magic was lost. I used to spend so much time in the rental aisle reading the game boxes and gaming magazines!
Thanks for sharing!
Commentary on your writing: I was a bit surprised by the writing style of your article at first. Then I realized: Kazeta is an art-piece and you are writing a “the arts” article on it. I think that this was the correct choice for the topic, but I found it hard to appreciate because coming from a link in the “Linux Gaming” community I was expecting a gaming or tech article instead. That would have had stats like how fast games load from “off” to “playing”, some example builds and prices for making an ideal Kazeta, a review of how hard it was to make your own SD, etc.
I think the mental space I’d put this in is like a Rolling Stone interview where you’re writing lyrically about Alkazar and his work while weaving in paragraph quotes from him.
Thanks!
I’ve written…well a bunch of different ‘styles’ of things over the last two or so years. I’ve had plenty of rambling rants on general gaming news (which gets shared exclusively here on Lemmy), and I’ve done just straight interviews (Heroic, Lutris, RetroDECK and so on), I figured it was time to at least try something different. I like the idea of a kind of feature article, and Alkazar was so kind to chat to me for awhile on Kazeta. It felt right.
I’m glad you enjoyed it, even if it kinda took you aback to begin with :)
Thanks for the comment!
Compact flash cards would be even better. They’re easier to handle and have a lot more room for a label. It’s too bad they are so much more expensive.
If you join his Discord, you’ll see he’s working out other physical ‘devices’ which will work on the same principle!
Early days so far, but its exciting to see all kinds of ideas being suggested in there :)
Oh good, another software project developed behind the proprietary closed doors of an AI datafeed machine
…It’s where the humans are, dude. I guess a gitlab or github would be better, but the users are on discord for conversations.
Mumble is a niche of a niche
Teamspeak is for ARMA and the pretentious
I can only speak of two people in my life who use Matrix
I cant think of anyone who uses guilded.
It’s where the humans are
At some point that has to not be enough.
The much more likely explanation is that people have no self respect. That they’ve given into the corporate surveillance and advertising machine because they just don’t care.
The worst thing is: every bit of knowledge on the Discord Guild (“”“server”“”) becomes an exclusive silo, unsearcheable and unindexable. It’s the worst case scenario for any software community, which is also why I dislike Nobara a lot.
It really is a mask off moment IMO and watershed between the people who actually care for the philosophy of free/libre software and those who – just like corporations – only see it as a more efficient development model…
