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.
Physical media killed my parents.
Rip in pieces dother
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 game tho, often we would borrow games from other kids in the neighbourhood. Although everyone had the same 5 super popular games, but 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.
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 Nibara 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…
…or it’s the networking effect of having a well-known easily accessible platform?
Usually for greater shifts to a new community/platform to occur, the original userbase/platform has to have an experience so unusable/egregious to the average user for them to switch. Lemmy/the Fediverse, for example, had a critical mass of users join after two incidents of self destruction by incumbents - Reddit’s API changes, and Twitter after Musk’s acquisition.
Discord hasn’t done this yet, and until the management performs an action that would lead to a mass migration (which could occur in the near future now that the company is publicly traded), the users that this developer needs for feedback and support are on discord. That is the primary reason so many projects are on discord. People don’t hate forums - they’re just on the platform that they’re familiar with, filled with their friends and community members.
Yeah you’re just repeating everything I already said in different words. And like every “well-known, easily accessible platform” it’s being exploited by it’s owners. They exploit your relationships and communities to hold you hostage. And everyone just seems totally fine with this. And it’s infuriating. It’s against everything open source stands for.
Thank you for proving my point.
lol i feel this XD
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!
The article repeats itself over and over, reiterating the same statements, so it feels like an AI wrote it.
The project itself is VERY cool! I instantly want to spend all my money to buy a 100 sdcards and set it all up.
Oh yikes, well that’s a hard thing to read when I wrote it! I’ll try make sure in future to diversify what the heck I’m trying to get across. Thanks for letting me know, even if it is a tough thing to read!
A little edit:
Alkazar is very happy with the article, as is Gardiner (whose site this is posted on). I’ve been writing for a long time now, you can check my post history here if you’d like to check through those which I’ve written exclusively for Lemmy. Or you can filter my posts on Gardiner’s site to see the others I’ve written. I’ve had a couple things posted on Gaming on Linux, and also on SDHQ.
As much as I try to not let it get under my skin, the dismissive ‘it’s just A.I.’ comment does get under my skin. It’s awful to read when a ton of work goes into these, and when friendships are formed because of what I write. I get that its not for you, and maybe my pacing of the article wasn’t for you either. Can’t pretend that it doesn’t hurt to read that.
I’m not a professional, this isn’t my business or my life. Its a hobby.
Dont worry too much man folks are really paranoid online about AI because it’s becoming really difficult to tell which is which.
Thank you! Its *ma’am!
But I think its sad too, that something has made us all doubt everything we read, and judge it all so harshly. What a strange world now :(
I would take it as a compliment even though it wasn’t meant that way. Your writing is so thoroughly organized that people assume a tool wrote it instead.
the dismissive ‘it’s just A.I.’ comment does get under my skin
It wasn’t my intention to get under your skin or to appear to be dismissive about your article, sorry. I admit the AI part was a bit harsh.
The wording itself never felt like AI. I’ve read the whole thing. At one point I thought the article started over because the content of a paragraph was extremely similar. Later there was a part of the summary, with another paragraph of the same. That reminded me of why I dislike AI responses. It does the same thing, but it is programmed to do so because thats what some people need to absorb the info.
Personally I prefer articles and videos with a very high information density. Thats all. You don’t have to change anything if you feel like this is not what you’re going for.
Cheers.
I didn’t get that impression. I’m also someone who will write a lot, incidentally recapitulating a point or two along the way, and it takes genuine high stakes to convince me to edit down.
I think these days, people are conditioned to see a page of text and always have that suspicion. Sadly it doesn’t help when the writing style is friendly, cheerful, and easily understood - it’s being copied by LLM makers for a reason.
Thank you for writing about this project. Game preservation is still undervalued, even in the age of Stop Killing Games imo. Indie creators like Alkazar aren’t going to change the world perhaps, but Kazeta certainly signifies an ideal that should not be forgotten.
Oh that’s so kind of you to say!
One thing I had to change with my writing was dropping my en and em dash use. I loved them, but seeing how Chat has adopted them and throws them out like confetti has made me change my ways :(
I’m really glad you enjoyed the content, Kazeta feels so unique and fun to me, it really desveres some attention!
The presence of LLMs has really cast a pall on creative writing. I want to find a positive spin on it; some call to action or a challenge to be met… I wonder what the people of Star Trek would do in our shoes.
Should we be letting LLMs change how we write, though? What is an artist’s best, most meaningful choice in this situation? I still don’t know.
the dismissive ‘it’s just A.I.’ comment
That isn’t what the person you replied to said.
