There was a post on Reddit the other day where the OP threw a bunch of their Steam Games on a bulk lot of SSDs. When they plugged the SATA drives into a docking station the games installed on the SATA drives would automatically launch due to a script the OP had added to the drives. It was a really cool way of putting their games on a physical medium. A buddy and I have been looking into how to do this the past few days because we would both still like to have physical games to put on our shelves in the future. Funny enough, I finally watched @EposVox ‘s latest video about Denshattack! and he had actually just made a physical copy of Denshattack! I think it could be a really fun experiment to start making physical copies of DRM free games and making custom cases for the games (I just found out about custom game cases the other day when I picked a DS style case for my OG copy of Pokemon Silver.)
I’ve been pretty bummed ever since Sony’s disc announcement but stuff like this makes me optimistic that theres always going to be a cool way to collect/display cool games!
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I saw a Video from Archades Games making physical disk games for steam games, Idk if they had DRM on the games for (the one he use was batman Arkham asylum GOTY) but He was able to back up the game to a disk and reinstall it that way and use it as a game key. like putting it in the disk drive and it boot up the game from your hard drive it was already installed. Really cool stuff.
With Gaming companies moving forward with their plans for an all digital future, we the people have to put forth the effort to resist when we can and call out their BS. And the best way to do that in my opinion is projects like these and sharing it with the world. To show others that there is another way to enjoy your hobbies/downtime. Yes there will be people who don’t care and will just buy because it’s the path of least resistance but, where is the fun in that when you can do cool stuff like making your own copies of games.
PCGamingWiki has info for some games about DRM. There’s Steam Curators for some info about some games. Otherwise it’s kinda a guessing game unless you want to meticulously check.
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Custom cases are a neat idea, and I have modified DS cases for all of my Pokemon Game Boy/Color/Advance games. Grabbed like 10 copies of Deal or No Deal for DS from Walmart back in 2017 for $1/each, was the cheapest cases I could get my hands on, had the GBA slot.
Used a dremel to cut out the bottom of the GBA slot and cut off the DS slot for GBC games to fit, too.
I know I recorded some part of the process, but I can’t find footage anywhere. Lifetime ago. But it’s a handy way if you want replica GBA boxes of sorts that don’t cost a ton and will actually hold up. (I have any REAL GB/GBA/N64/SNES boxes I have in plastic shell boxes to keep them safe, the cardboard does not hold. I don’t pursue boxed cart games for this reason.)
A phenomenal resource for all of this is: https://thecoverproject.net
Very fortuitous timing… just found out about this community for getting SOME form of physical manifestation for indie games:
Also people are starting to ask about a DVD-R scene for indie games:
Also the developer of a game I’m reviewing put out xeroxed posters in NYC old school style!
Just trying to manifest what I want in the universe:
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Physical demo discs would be really cool. Brings me back to my teens when I bought the local Playstation magazine to check out the newest demo’s.
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Thank you for the info, I just saw that the og five nights at freddy’s games are DRM free and can fit on a cd. I know what I’m gonna do soon.
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