wtf is pc-cartridge-system?

PC Cartridge System is a hobby project that turns your digital Steam or GoG game library into something you can hold: a physical cartridge. You take a small 2.5 inch SATA SSD, add a short launcher script to it, and when you plug that drive into your computer, the system notices it and automatically launches the game or action you configured. The project is explicitly a personal experiment, not an official Steam product, and the author notes that automatic launching depends on your operating system's settings around automounting drives and running scripts. On Linux, three pieces work together. A udev rule watches for a new storage device being connected and simply notifies the rest of the system that a cartridge might have been inserted. A systemd service then takes over and starts a helper program, passing along which device was plugged in. That helper waits for the drive to finish mounting, looks for a script called launch.sh at the top level of the drive, checks its checksum against a list of scripts you have explicitly marked as trusted, and only runs it if the checksum matches. Windows works in a similar way using a scheduled task that keeps a monitoring script running in the background, watching for new drives and checking for a launch.ps1 file the same way. Before any script can run automatically, you have to add it through a trust step built into the installer, so nothing on a cartridge executes on its own the first time you plug it in. You can also turn automatic launching on or off entirely, and there is an uninstall option that removes all configuration and the list of trusted scripts. STEP files for 3D printing a cartridge dock are shared separately on MakerWorld. While the project is built around 2.5 inch SATA SSDs, the author mentions the same basic idea could work with other removable storage like SD cards or USB drives, though that is not guaranteed and depends heavily on your particular setup. This project suits hobbyists and PC gamers who want a fun, tactile way to launch their games rather than clicking through a library, and who are comfortable running an installer script and trusting scripts manually as part of the setup.