Remember a couple of weeks ago, when we reported on a gamer who transformed old 2.5-inch SATA SSDs into game cartridges? Well, meet the Steam Deck owner who gave the floppy disk medium new life. Honestly, it’s a…kind of, sort of situation with this, plus a pinch of “but why?” thrown into the pot.

The Steam Deck owner, who goes by the handle BlackIceLA on Reddit, posted on the /SteamDeck subreddit about their project on how they wanted “something like Zaparoo”, a system that uses NFC to read cards and codes to launch games, over a bunch of platforms. So, in that spirit, they took it upon themselves to create something, but for their Steam Deck.

“I dreamed of having Zaparoo or Batocera, but where it would be more deeply integrated into SteamOS. Pairing could happen from the game page, devices showing in the quick access menu, Steam games launching/quitting without any extra hackiness. That’s when I started making (with my friend Claude) a Steam Deck plugin called “Decky Links” to detect QR codes, NFC tags, USB drives and Floppy disks. You pair the media by storing a steam game url e.g. `steam://run/1174180` on the media disk/tag. No game data is actually on the media/tag, only the url.” – BlackIceLA.

BlackIceLA’s concept does have several physical aspects to it, literally. Firstly, you will need a floppy disk reader, albeit having been modified to have a tag instead of a magnetic storage disk. For those who were born after the year 2000, the standard floppy disk has a maximum capacity of 1.44MB, which is way, way smaller than what most games require in storage.

Trigger Steam games from floppy disks!
byu/BlackIceLA inSteamDeck

To be clear: none of the floppy disks shown in BlackIceLA’s video actually contain any game. With their Decky Link system, it just stores a small Steam URL that commands the Steam Deck to launch the game, either from its internal storage or the microSD card.

As interesting as this is, the collective thought and question on every mind over it is “but why?”, and you can’t really fault them for it. With the game cartridges, the idea was still practical and put to use storage devices that are still relevant, more so in a time when memory and storage are haemorrhaging the wallets of the general consumer. Oh, and it was for the PC as well. This, though, feels more like an indulgence than anything else. As it stands, they’re using the only USB-C port on the Steam Deck to connect the floppy disk reader, and the storage medium is pretty much extinct.

(Source: Reddit)

Updated 4:41 pm, Fri, 7 August 26