Foone🏳️⚧️
once again, I'm asking software companies to stop using april fools day as an excuse to announce a floppy disk edition of their game/software.
at least, don't do that unless you're really gonna sell it to me. or hey, get in touch with me and let ME make it possible.
Foone🏳️⚧️
cyberpunk2077 is the one doing it this year:
https://www.cyberpunk.net/en/news/50098/introducing-a-limited-floppy-edition-of-cyberpunk-2077
Foone🏳️⚧️
they estimate it'll take over 2 months of non-stop disk swapping to finish installing. I bet I could get those numbers down. I've got a floppy disk autoloader. I could probably manage all 97,619 disks in under a month.
Foone🏳️⚧️
I would need to build a better hopper though. Right now I max out at like 70-100 disks loaded at a time.
Foone🏳️⚧️
@mjgardner yeah. or hell, vinyl!
Mark Gardner
@foone How about cassette?
Foone🏳️⚧️
@AT1ST yeah it's like a return to that period when CD-ROMs didn't have DRM because they were just took big for anyone to duplicate. but instead of hard drive space, it's physical space and annoyance of copying
Alexander The 1st
@foone That's certainly one way to do DRM.
"Don't copy that floppy, but if you do, make sure you're also copying the 97618 other floppies that came with it."
Foone🏳️⚧️
@k0ffy They last factory making them stopped in 2012 or 2013, so no, they're a dwindling resource. There are still a fuckton of unused ones out there so it's not like we're running out anytime soon, though.
Adam K0FFY ☕️
@foone Hear! Hear! Foone, I’ve also been wondering for a while now if anyone is manufacturing floppies anymore? Or are they a dwindling resource?
Foone🏳️⚧️
@kboyd yeah, it's been done! there's been custom designed floppy drives that run at higher speed or have multiple heads. they're just rare
Kevin Boyd
@foone would it be possible to use some sort of magnetic mass-reading mechanism to read the bits off all the disks simultaneously?
Foone🏳️⚧️
@kboyd I misread. all the drives at once? you'd really juts need 98,000 drives. and even I don't have that many
Foone🏳️⚧️
@kboyd sadly not, no. Like, maybe you could read a whole disc at once by ripping it out of the jacket and placing it flat on some magnetically sensitive surface... But that'd destroy it and also you'd only get one side
Kevin Boyd
@foone No, I mean, contactless reading of all the data in a stack. Like a tricorder could do (if the script called for it).
Mark Gardner
Honestly, I don’t know why @foone even bothers with floppies. (3/3)
Mark Gardner
But it’s stupid slow! 50bps, not 300bps! So prerecorded #Commodore 8-bit software bootstraps “turbotape” code to use a faster and compressed, but still digital, format.
Using turbotape, you could hypothetically fit roughly 3 megabytes on your 120-minute #C64 cassette! So #Cyberpunk2077’s #AprilFools 97,619 1.44MB floppies could theoretically span only 43,885 datasettes, plus any code needed to stitch the split code together. (2/3)
Mark Gardner
@clairely_undaunted @foone Except the #Commodore Datasette doesn’t work anything like that.
It has a *lot* more error protection and uses multiple square waves and a parity bit instead of alternating analog tones like other systems. It even has a DAC and filters—no audio conversion on the computer necessary. (1/3)
niche witch with a 🐝
@mjgardner @foone the 8 bit Commodore machines use 300bps communication speed to the tape device. Using 120 minute tapes, with no error checking or correction (usually the ROM load routine would read the data twice to confirm the data was read correctly, incredibly inefficient) it would take about 533,130 (!) tapes to store that many 1.44MB floppies so somewhere around 1070K hours (about 5 years of continuously changing tapes every two hours) loading, assuming they were using 1.44MB floppies in the game joke. The mechanism is kind of harsh on thin 120m tapes, so I doubt it would be possible to do it a small multiple of times, even if it worked the first time. [edit: dropped a MB to KB conversion in my first version, whoops]
Foone🏳️⚧️
@mjgardner how DARE you! :)
Foone🏳️⚧️
@ppxl Kinda? Here's how it looks. You stack up floppies inside it, and there's a motor that moves a metal arm to inject and then eject the bottom floppy
Pxl Phile
@foone you have a...wat? I am intrigued how does it work? Like a PEZ dispenser?
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