You might want to check out Kazeta, it's a project with similar goals

So Kazeta as others mention is about putting games onto SD cards.

Another project is https://zaparoo.org/ - this one doesn't store the data on the card, but instead uses NFC so people can have "fake" cartridges that trigger the load of a game on the Linux system. This allows people to make something that looks great but is simply a stylish trigger to load the media (games, sites, movies, doesn't matter what).

Never looked much into it, but I remember reading about kazeta somewhere on the fediverse and should work like that

https://kazeta.org/

Was literally reading this right before seeing this.

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/pc-gamer-turns-steam-games-into-cartridges-with-ingenious-2-5-inch-ssd-system-games-are-stored-on-128gb-drives-alongside-a-script-to-auto-start-the-title-once-plugged-in

Plus this for the collection

I only see this working properly if the game is made portable and saves all its data in the game folder. Which would leave mostly DOS games.

Not quite but got this in my recommended after the whole PlayStation debacle

https://youtu.be/rAYxyme7uTg

Thought of this because of the Sony announcement.

Would there be an easy way to make the game auto-launch if the card is inserted?

For SNES specifically, you could about have every game ever made, your save data, and a light OS on a nice sd card.

There are some Pi rigs like that.

Recalbox or similar are certainly a thing, but that doesn't really help with GOG games so much as roms. Depends on what the end goal is.

There's a lot of support for NFC launchers too. Stuff like Zaparoo, and websites to make custom labels for them.

It's not the same idea but it's the same "take a thing off a shelf and use to to play a game" sort of vibe if that's what you're after. And it would be a lot cheaper, SD cards have skyrocketed lately.

I'd rather see someone remake these old games so that the maximum object count can be raised. Just played a ROM of Link to the Past on SNES and the game crawls to a halt in some areas because the engine has to render several objects moving at once...

Check this out: https://hackaday.com/2026/07/20/old-ssds-find-new-life-as-game-cartridges/

Just saw it on Hack a Day and remembered this post. It's using old SSDs instead of SD cards but is basically what you're describing.

And they're using auto launch scripts like I mentioned in my first comment and a whitelist to address security.

Ok wait what's the speed of access to the SD here? I always thought it would be a problem.

Done before. Pretty straight forward. Even making a basic Bash or CMD launcher is pretty simple, if you just want an interactive menu for opening games.

Also GOG has emulated games, so the image could be taken more literally too.

What is a LogiLink?