PC GamePak

Turn removable storage into physical game cartridges. Plug one in and a launcher appears with the game's cover art and two buttons.

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A cartridge is a small drive in a pocketable enclosure with a game on it. Push it into a USB-C port; the launcher opens showing what is on it. Press Play to start the game, or Eject to power the drive down and pull it out.

Each cartridge is a drive with a cartridge.conf text file at its root. There are no scripts to write and nothing to allowlist, because nothing on a cartridge is ever executed automatically — pressing Play is the gate.

   

Features

• Plug and it opens. A background watcher notices the drive and shows the launcher. Nothing runs until you press Play — or, if you ask it to, the game starts on its own, a notification appears, or nothing happens at all. Even set to start the game, a program carried on the cartridge still waits for a click: a URI hands off to a launcher you already have, and a stranger's binary does not get the machine.
• One game or a shelf of them. A cartridge can carry a collection, with a rail to pick from.
• Real eject. The button parks the drive and powers it down, elevating only if the unprivileged path fails.
• Controller and keyboard. A pad navigates the list and works the buttons; so do the arrow keys, Enter, E and I.
• Skinnable, by the cartridge. A .gamepak/skin.css on the drive restyles the launcher — its size, layout, and which of the four artworks it shows in each place. Fourteen worked examples with screenshots in docs/skins/; SKINNING.md is the reference.
• Artwork from SteamGridDB, optional and off until you add a key. Covers, heroes, logos and icons are written onto the cartridge, so it looks the same on a machine that has never heard of it.
• Steam-aware. A cartridge registers as a Steam library so copied games run from the drive rather than being redownloaded.
• The cartridge counts its own hours. Launches, playtime and last-played go on the drive, not on the PC, so the count follows the cartridge between machines.
• Saves that travel too, optional and off until you turn it on. A cartridge can say where its saves live — as {appdata}/Foo/Saves, resolved by whichever platform reads it — and insert and eject carry whichever copy changed. If both changed, neither is touched and the launcher says so; anything replaced is kept beside it. A game the cartridge carries needs none of that: one line gives it its whole home directory on the drive, and every save it writes goes there whether or not anyone knew where it would put them.
• Memory cards. A drive with a memorycard.conf carries saves and no games: plug it in and every save shows as a block, the way a console's memory card browser showed them, with which copy is newer and a button to copy it either way. The wizard makes one — it finds where each game saves from Ludusavi's list if you switch that on, or you point at the folder. A cartridge can be a combo drive too, and keep its memory card one button away.
• Tap to select a GamePak. Write its stable ID as an NDEF URI and use a PC/SC-compatible PN532 reader. The card selects the launcher entry; Play is still required to start the game.
• Works offline. Nothing phones home. Network use is limited to optional artwork lookup and any Wake-on-LAN/readiness checks you configure for a host.

Supported platforms

	Status
Windows 10 / 11	Supported
Linux (systemd + udev)	Supported
Steam Deck	Supported
macOS	Not yet — the drive layer needs a rewrite

Any removable drive works: NVMe in a USB enclosure, a portable SSD, or a USB stick. NTFS by default — the one format that both Windows and Linux write and that holds the symlinks Steam needs to install Proton onto a cartridge. exFAT when a Mac has to write to the drive, btrfs for Linux-only cartridges, and five more in the picker for a cartridge that only ever meets one kind of machine.

Install

Windows — WinGet:

winget install HarryBMa.PCGamePak

Or Scoop:

scoop bucket add harrybma https://github.com/HarryBMa/scoop-bucket
scoop install pc-gamepak

Either puts both programs on your PATH, but a package manager cannot register the watcher to start at logon — that is what opens the launcher when a cartridge goes in — so run the installer once (it is in the package's folder, or take it from Releases):

powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File install.ps1 -Mode Watcher

Linux — the pacman package is written and tested, and waiting on the AUR reopening registrations. Building it by hand is a clone and a command:

git clone https://github.com/HarryBMa/pc-gamepak.git
cd pc-gamepak/packaging/aur/pc-gamepak && makepkg -si
systemctl --user enable --now pc-gamepak-watcher.service

There is a Flatpak too, for everything else and for the Steam Deck. Or clone and run sudo linux/install.sh, or linux/install-user.sh for a rootless install under ~/.local.

Full instructions, and why automount decides whether any of it works →

Usage

Run pc-gamepak --create to open the wizard: pick a game, pick a drive, and it writes the cartridge — copying the files if you ask it to, fetching artwork, and registering the drive with Steam.

Then plug the cartridge in. The launcher opens; press Play.

To write one by hand, put a cartridge.conf at the drive's root:

title=Stardew Valley
executable=steam://rungameid/413150
cover=cover.jpg

Build from source

Needs Rust and Node 18+. On Windows also the Visual Studio Build Tools with "Desktop development with C++"; on Linux, webkit2gtk and libudev.

git clone https://github.com/HarryBMa/pc-gamepak.git
cd pc-gamepak
cd tauri-ui && npm install && npm run build && cd ..

sudo linux/install.sh          # Linux
# Windows: right-click windows/install.ps1 → Run with PowerShell

core/ holds every decision the launcher and wizard make, with no UI and no Tauri, so cd core && cargo test covers the logic on any machine.

More

Installing on Linux · The manual · Writing a skin · Other frontends · Where the project is · What changed · Contributing

License

MIT.