I remember installing “PowerBuilder” onto my machine back in the day. It was 22 floppy discs to get the complete enterprise edition installed.
Just think how much more breathing room people coding for boot sector games would have
Whoever designed the poster didn’t see a floppy disk on their lives.
Maybe it’s a regurgitate essence of a floppy disk by AI.
That AI ought to be stuck on a floppy for a few years to teach it some manners.
That’s enough for at least 22 copies of QUOD
Minimum specs
Intel i5 or equivalent
GTX 770 or equivalent
8 GB RAM
64 KB disk space
That makes me laugh. 64kb space. But still needs 8gb of RAM and an i5.
you might already know, but this is because the game has a small executable but basically spends minutes at startup generating all the possible textures the game will need procedurally.
I do find it funny how they were nice enough to compress this executable, with the uncompressed version coming at a whopping 108kb. Meanwhile, the screenshots are each about 2MB
WASM-4 would good engine for this. Assuming you don’t also have to ship the runtime.
Games are at most 64kb.
It seems they’re including the runtime in the size, and have prohibited web based games for this reason (unless you can find a browser that fits in 1.44MB). Submissions must be a native executable (I’m assuming for x86)
Well technically since it compiles to wasm you just need a wasm runtime and a rendering system. Not a whole browser. Some people have reported getting wasm-4 games running on microcontrollers.
I’m sure you could do it with a standalone runtime, but it will just be overhead compared to compiling directly to x86, at least for the purposes of this competition. I’m a fan of WASM for a lot of other applications tho
The raw capacity of a 1.44MB 3.5” diskette[0] is 2MB, 1MB per side. The FAT12 formatting chews >25% of its usable capacity. I realised this when the ‘backup’ systems for the Super Nintendo could write a 16Mbit cartridge to a single diskette.
This raises the question: Is a console game up to 2MiB eligible?
[0]: 3.5” are diskettes, 5.25” and 8” are floppies.
No, they’re all floppy disks. Cause the platter was floppy, even if the disk wasn’t.
[0]: 3.5” are diskettes, 5.25” and 8” are floppies.
Not a distinction that I ever heard, and I lived thought the 5.25" and 3.5" eras.
I lived through all 3, and I’ve always called them diskettes. My recollection is they were called that in the original Sony documentation, which appears to be elided from my brief searches this evening.
I’ll chalk it up to colloquial laundering, much like all 8P8C ports and cables now being called ‘Ethernet’.
Lots of manufacturers called them lots of different things.
How about an OS and games?
Holy moly, this is insanely awesome. Can this revive Chromebooks and ancient machines? Can it actually play YouTube videos with sound, though?
It is mostly an incredibly cool hobby project, nothing that you can daily drive nor something that strives to be daily drivable
There’s chess games in less than 50 bytes.
Not with the logic included
In era of hundreds of GB game, to see someone make game less than 2 MB is very surprising. it’s like we going back to NES era where every game fit in one single cartridge, no update, no DLC, and no resources hogging, everything was smooth
I used to copy Apple II games, and they ran in 48k and often shared a floppy. Some even did vector graphics, which was kind of like deep black magic back then. The Amiga (which could actually do graphics properly) people will tell you similar stories.
Not less than 2MB, but Animal Well is only 33MB in total. That’s including any updates, etc.
That’s so insanely impressive to me. One of the best games this decade, and it’s way under 100 MB
This is more like a competition than anything, GameJams is an integral part of the indie games communities and something a fair share of developers likes doing.
It’s a way to try to come up with new concepts and get feedback on it. Often with one or more constraints/themes from the specific jam you’re participating in
Many of the earlier SNES games were below 2 MB too, for example, Super Mario World is around half a MB, and A Link to the Past is around 1 MB.
can confirm i used to burn snes roms on floppy
I think the original Cave Story is between 5-6 MB.
Procedural generation.
Procedural generation everywhere.
Yeah .kkrieger a 3d FPS is only 96 KB and it achieved that with procedural generation.
quod is even more impressive at 64kb https://daivuk.itch.io/quod
I’d love to see a basic Minecraft clone clock in under 1.44 MB
Probably possible with no textures, or procgen’d ones.
I actually had 5 and a quarter inch floppies as a kid and apparently they cap out at 1.2MB. They had pretty rad games, although I barely remember why we had like, hundreds of them, obtained second hand I guess.
IIRC they were more like 170kb? Single sided (single density). I had the C64 ones.
My family’s IBM compatible had 5¼" double sided double density disks that held 360KB.
But there was a lot of variations between platforms:
We had hundreds with pirated games for our C64. Alongside miles of printouts to see which game is on which disk.
Boxes with floppies of pirated games.
Good times ☺️
I would love to see a return to the floppy and old-school computing, esp in response to hardware skyrocketing in price… I know it’s unrealistic but it hits me right in the nostalgia reading about this stuff
Wait, are entrants allowed to spread their game across multiple floppy disks, as was commonplace in the 90s?
Bonus points for saves being written to the floppy without checking if there is important files there already, leasing to a broken game if the save file is put on the wrong floppy.
Just don’t remove the write protection.
Good idea, but then you cannot write the save to the floppy. Some older games would disable write protection to every disk instead of just the one you should store saves on. Lead to a lot of problems, you can imagine.
What? Floppy disks have physical write protection tabs
Yes. Most floppies had a write protect tab you would slide to set whether writing was protected or not. However, when buying games some floppies didn’t have that tab exposed because the write protection was supposed to be set by the manufacturers when they created them for sale. On some games, they messed up and set the disk write protect to the unprotected setting (thus disabling write protection) on ALL of the disks and not just the disk they intended you to use for saves. If you didn’t read carefully, forgot, or were playing a foreign imported game in a language you don’t quite understand, you might accidentally write a save onto a disk you weren’t supposed to, and the games with this problem usually didn’t check to see if there were important files it was overwriting before just writing the save file.
the freshly prepared game must be able to squeeze onto a single HD floppy disk - that’s just 1.44MB
Literally in the first paragraph of the article.
MS Teams just had a panic attack.
As a result of this panic attack, MS Teams will use 30MB more RAM on the next startup. You should know better than to frighten poor MS Teams, when you know it’s got poor self-esteem!
Teams does that even when running entirely unconstrained.
Plus, it lets you cook an egg in the surface of your laptop.
Best I can do is 60GB of AI generated assets for my farming/life simulator
