Giving The NES An Optical Data Storage Add-On

https://hackaday.com/2026/08/30/giving-the-nes-an-optical-data-storage-add-on/

7 points · 3 comments · view on lemmy.world

3 Comments

Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 15d (2 replies)

Hang on.....a typical NES rom is about 20-60mb depending on title. A blank CD-r holds 700mb of storage. So you can't fit the entire NES library on a single CD-r, but I feel like you can fit every game that you're realistically going to play. So in that sense, I get it. But what I don't get is this doesn't use the expansion port. It uses a USB cable to connect to an everdrive.

If you're going to use an everdrive either way, what is the point? Just put all the roms on the everdrive. Which I assume you can use any microSD card. At that point you CAN fit every single game ever for the NES onto the everdrive. I don't recommend that. It's technically superior, but I find having a smaller personally curated list of games to be better for finding a game you want to play, fast.

Even so, I still find zero advantages of using this. Am I missing the point? Is there some context I don't get? I read the article. Even if it used the expansion port, then it becomes cool in a "what if?" sort of way, rather than a realistically useful way.

But this just looks bulky, uneeded, and I don't see the advantage to doing this.

AVincentInSpace@pawb.social · 2 pts · 15d

a typical NES rom is about 20-60mb

I'm sorry?

An NES game that uses mapper 0 (e.g. Super Mario Bros) is 40KB. If memory serves the largest game ever released for the system was one megabyte. Online estimates vary for the total filesize of the NES library, but they hover around 250MB.

As for why you would want to do this, idk, a lot of retro gamers are nostalgic for CDs and want to bring the NES into the future but not too far?

CrazyLikeGollum@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 15d

The guy who made it says it was more of a "because it's neat" kind of project rather than being something practical.

Also, a complete library of NES ROMs is something like 200MB. The NES never had a cart capable of storing more than 512kb and early carts got as small as 16kb.