Yea, so this doesn’t exist, but should it?
Think about:
- TheMovieDB style identifiers with box art
- Auto-generated and/or community created and upvoted DVD labels, case inserts, or USB/SSD stickers you can print yourself (no reason physical media has to be “round”)
- Automated scripts for generating local media savers/installers from GOG and Steam
This doesn’t seem like a very difficult thing to create for the niche community of people that want physical copies.
If you want the game to last forever, it assumes you’ve already got it sourced from somewhere DRM-free, where you can continually copy it to other healthy media. Nothing lasts forever, but this is meant to replicate a lot of the strengths of old consoles, fortunately without some of their own pitfalls like save batteries.
SSTech requires power to maintain cells.
What we need is liberated schematics Blu-ray burner+ readers, so you can burn even a small cast, and reread until your descendants50 make another copy.
Doesn’t recordable optical media also have a pretty limited lifespan? Unlike commercially produced discs, where the pits are pressed into the plastic, CD/DVD/BD-Rs just have a dye that is made to change colour with a laser, and that dye degrades over time.
Even pressed discs can rot. Like many WB Blu-Rays were made with a faulty process and many will rot in the next few decades.
All things decay, not even the doping of ROM chips will last forever, but I think the average lifespan of recorded optical media is like, 10 years? That feels rather short.
Not for this project, you don’t.