Hacker News Reader

Comment by cout | Hacker News Reader

Is it still possible to buy smaller SD cards in bulk, maybe 8mb or 16mb? The smallest I could find was 128mb for about the same price as a 2gb card.

While I like the idea of physically separate cards for each game, at $10 per card it seems economically limiting.

View on HN

As an alternative you can still buy small flash drives in bulk (Amazon has listings of 128MB ones for less than a dollar per drive). They don't look as good as SD cards on their own but you could rip out the internals and place them in 3d printed enclosures, which could be an even better result.

I would assume the quality of those things is not great, but the design of this system means they're basically read-only so that should hopefully help them survive longer.

The smallest I could find was 128MB (see adjacent thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45101932) on Aliexpress but you are right, they are comparatively expensive. A source for those obsolete cards would be great. Have they all been shredded by now? Or is there a forgotten shipping container somewhere? :)

Given storage sizes, the cartridge is symbolic. Use NFC tags and a reader and just load the appropriate ROM off disk.

<$3 bucks for 16GB on AliExpress

Still feels like a waste to put 4mb game on it

Don't worry, it's actually a 4MB SD card with a fake sticker

Im sure there are such rippoffs, I’ve heard of them but they were still way bigger than a game cart. I like the idea of physical cartriges/media for games, let’s see how this catches on.

Finally a use for all the free SD cards MicroCenter gives away, lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com