Astrolabe Digest: 02072025

Hey, hi! Welcome to Astrolabe Digest. This is a new column for paid supporters1 aimed at keeping y’all informed about the best stories in Astrolabe’s orbit. Astrolabe Digest isn’t here to replace main Astrolabe issues, but to supplement them by bringing you more goodness while the big stories bake. Think of it like a levelled-up version of Quest Markers.

With freelance games journalism becoming more and more untenable, I’m looking at diverting my time and energy toward providing more value for paid Astrolabe supporters, as a way to keep doing what I’m doing. So, if you appreciate my work here or elsewhere, consider a paid subscription.

Video Game History Foundation launches massive digital archive

• Founded in 2017 by Frank Cifaldi, the Video Game History Foundation is dedicated to the preservation of video game-related documents, publications, and other ephemera. The launch of a new digital archive, free to use for research purposes, marks a major milestone for the organization, fulfilling a promise in the works since its foundation.
• "We’ve been collecting development documents, behind-the-scenes content, rare video game publications and catalogs, magazines, memorabilia, ephemera, and more," explained library director Phil Salvador. "After years of cataloging, processing, and digitizing our collections, we’re ready to open our (virtual) doors to the public for the first time."
• In addition to reams of high quality scans of classic gaming magazines, a statement from VGHF highlights its collection of artwork, press and promo for fan favourite games (and not so fan favourite), and “never before seen game development materials.”
• Digital archives of physical objects are great, but physical archives of digital AI slop in our libraries? Not so much. "Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated," reports Emanuel Maiberg for 404 Media.
• Why is it so important to archive this material and make it broadly available? "Looking at these magazines now, through the lens of contemporary video game culture, it’s not just what is there, but what is not there,” John O’Shea, creative director and co-CEO of the National Videogame Museum told The Guardian. “The majority of characters featured in magazines up to the early 2010s are men. I looked at a selection of PC magazines from 2011 and there were the same number of female protagonists represented as there were panda protagonists.”
• Included in the library is a scan of Game Informer #354, which is the first time my feature on retro demakes of modern games has been available online.

Play PlayStation 2 games directly from your... memory card?

• Optical media revolutionized console gaming when the PlayStation blew up in the late 90s, but what if I told you that 30 years later you can skip discs altogether and load games right off your memory card? That's reality now thanks to a homebrew app, which allows you to load PS2 ROMs right from a MemCard Pro 2 or the open source SD2PSX memory card.
• "This is all done via the Multi-Purpose Memory Card Emulation (MMCE) protocol, which allows you to run the homebrew app OPL from the card and boot ISO files—as well as store save data on it," explains Time Extension's Damien McFerran. "It should be obvious what a massive deal this is; a single memory card-sized device is now capable of hosting your game collection and your save data, and you also benefit from the ability to store that save data in the cloud."
• Not only can games be stored directly on the SD card with your saves, but the MCP2 also features SSD support via USB, so you can hook up a big drive to store as many games as you need. Presumably this will have long-term performance benefits.
• "Now we [have] a single device and it [launches] our entire library of games," says Macho Nacho Production's Tito Perez. "It really hasn't been any easier than it is now to play the games that we love on the PS2."
• Coincidentally, I picked up a MemCard Pro 2 solely for its various features as a memory card—including automatic game-specific virtual memory cards and cloud backups—so this is a pleasent surprise. I've got a huge collection of PS2 games, but they're taking up a lot of shelf space, and this gives me a good alternative option. I've tested out several games, and encountered zero issues. This is one of the easiest mods I've ever done—literally just dragging a single file onto the MemCard Pro 2. It's a stretch even to call it a mod, it's just so easy and works right out of the box. Remarkable.
• You can find all the files you need for your device (sans one .bin file) in the description of Macho Nacho's video.

Final Fantasy VII Rebirth launches big on PC

• "Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth had a fantastic Steam launch," reported industry analyst Matt Piscatella, citing Circana Retail Tracking Service. "Across physical & tracked digital, Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth was the best-selling game of the week ending Jan 25th in the US market ($ sales), while the FFVII Remake & Rebirth Twin Pack ranked 3rd."
• Long tied to game consoles, Final Fantasy actually has a fairly lengthy, if uneven, history on PCs, as I reported on for Epic Games Store.
• "However, in this day and age, an increasing number of users play games from a variety of environments, including smartphones, consoles, PCs, and the cloud, creating a more pronounced tendency that simply launching a game for one environment is not enough to attract a large number of users," director Naoki Hamaguchi told me in a different interview for Epic Games Store. "As such, it has become more common for many developers to offer their games for multiple platforms, and we believe this trend will continue going forward."
• "One thing is clear," wrote RPGSite Editor-in-Chief Alex Donaldson on Bluesky, "the next game really needs to launch on PC - and ideally if at all possible, everything. Xbox and Switch 2 as well. This is what this series needs to thrive."

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