i know me too.what a waste of time lol. unless they had some ancient disk copier machine, it probably took ages to copy data onto all the floppies. not sure how many they made but i feel bad for whoever had to sit there and copy them one by one. and its not like it really mattered if there was anything on it all, it was just a stupid image, and id bet 99% of people didnt even check it lol
Low quality chocolate is awesome. I realized this as a kid. Used to be that the store I went to after school had these really low-quality, smallish chocolate bars of the cheapest, worst stuff possible. The funny thing was that because it was so low quality, it always tasted a bit different. Each time was a new experience. I imagine they had absolutely no quality control and mixed the ingredients badly so the proportions were always off. But yeah, that was one of the joys of my childhood. Admittedly, I had a very poor childhood.
Windows installation floppies weren't formatted to the standard size. They used a special format called DMF (Distribution Media Format, using 21 sectors per track instead of the typical 18), and could hold up to 1680KB. 2024 floppies, then.
The floppy disk was a stroke of genius on their part. They know old school RPG gamers still have old systems as most older games are DOS or Windows 3.1 compatible only. It's a pretty neat idea.
No, the first edition(s?) of 95 were indeed available on floppy, for the terminally out of date or masochistic. The aforementioned 486SX in my lounge would have been capable of running 95 as I found it (4mb, 120mb HDD and no CD drive!), and as they wanted maximum market penetration they had to support that. As upgraded (8mb, 420mb HDD, CDROM, sound card, and all possible BIOS speed tweaks) it'd make quite a nice, basic Win95 office or schoolwork rig, even if not very good for games or internet.
Windows 8 doesnt support floppy disk drives... directly. By that I mean, if you have a floppy disk controller built into your motherboard. USB is a totally different beast however, those simply use a universal removal drive system that is supported on windows 8.
mrcannibalfreak by retards you mean people with touch devices? Also, the newest update brought back the desktop, and windows 8 is included on nearly all modern computers now. I personally still use windows 7, and the obfuscation of power tools in windows 8 would infuriate me, but that doesn't mean all windows 8 users are retards xD
So you are saying that there's no drivers for the on-board floppy controllers? To my knowledge I haven't seen a motherboard with a floppy connector in years, so that's why Win8 machines do not seem to support floppies. And the USB floppy drives still have the floppy controller inside them. The USB works as a bridge to make the computer to see the floppy drive.
lBonaCl USB is basically an advanced powered communications port. The data at the end of the day coming off a floppy is no different than any other drive, and would use the same standards as they would.
You say this, and he went to Gamescon, has reviewed multiple gaming devices, did an LP with Guru Larry (and didnt suck at it, both of them did well) and i could go on!
Not forgetting the vast improvement in transfer speeds. How marvelous the tech is in this day and age, yet in the future we will laugh at it's capabilities like we do a floppy. :D
A good estimate is 90 seconds per disc if they're efficiently formatted, in good condition, and you're a goddamn ninja at swapping them right when it's needed. More realistically, two minutes per disc. So somewhere between 50 and 68 hours, straight. I'd say 3 whole days doing nothing other than swapping discs, hitting enter, and sleeping. (You can eat/drink/visit the bathroom between swaps, or possibly even simultaneously by using your other hand if you're reasonably dextrous)
Usually when that sort of thing happens it's because it was a failure because they either didn't get their sales for it in the black or it didn't make the projected sales quota. It's really depressing but they put so much marketing and other random stuff into these triple AAA games that a good couple million sold isn't good enough.
A lot of the data in the ISO will already be quite well compressed, so you won't get more than a fractional gain. The estimate I made (of reducing from 2500 to 2000 discs through a combination of enhanced compression and a custom format) is probably a bit optimistic if anything.
Back when everything was in kilobytes and the difference was only 2.4% between the two, it wasn't a huge problem if you slipped up and got the wrong one. Bit more significant with megs, rather noticeable with gigs (as it's 7.4%!). I think as we've got up to terabytes, people have just given up, because the numbers are so huge it's hard to be particularly accurate anyway. But a "2TB" hard drive, which holds about 2.0 x 10^12 bytes, only holds 1.82 x 2^40 on the binary scale - nearly 10% "less".
Never mind that CD writers and read-only DVDs (or combi DVD/CDRW) drives were not uncommon by the time that XP hit, and a computer comfortably capable of running it - or indeed, 98SE, which balked at the idea of anything much less than 32mb (I think I found 24 was the level at which it really started to complain, and 64~96 was far, far more comfortable) - that didn't have a CD drive, or at least a Zip to copy stuff FROM a PC with one - would have been highly unusual.
I remember Office v4 (the last one before 95) coming on 35 disks... it literally took three hours to install. We made very sure to back that up onto something faster and higher capacity (e.g. Zipdisk) as soon as we had access to such. Reputedly the non-CD version Windows 95 came on 50+ special high-capacity format (1.68mb) 3.5" floppies ... and a 5.25" version was also available. Jeez.
All my PC's have floppy drives, not really for data storage but for emergency BIOS recovery and booting fro simple boot discs. Plus I can transfer stuff to my amiga from the PC using them. I also have a 250MB zip drive
I think you might be confusing floppies with memory chips. Static did nothing for floppies, as they store their data magnetically, and magnetism isn't generally affected by static electricity. However, if the disc itself carried a charge, that might have affected the drive's ability to read it effectively (solution - ground yourself whilst holding the disc). The "reading immediately after writing" thing sounds more like your actual drive was on the blink. Once the data's written, it's written.
Pity, though. USB drives are all well and good, but thanks to that abstraction layer, you can't directly access the hardware, which means you're pretty much limited to reading plain DOS-format 1.44mb discs and hoping they're in good condition. If I have a disc in an unusual format or that has even minor damage, and I want to rescue and archive the files off it, I have to use that 486 instead... (or at a pinch, the backup PC, booting into PC-DOS off a live CD so to use properly low-level tools)
I'm so glad that you brought M&M X to my attention, I've been waiting years for them to pick up the series again. 6,7 and 8 were some of my greatest gaming memories and I still play them regularly. Ahhh, hopefully they do the series justice. Really excited about this!
One of my friends once thought me how to split a large file (over 1,4 Mb) so you could store it on several floppy disks. I never actually used that skill as simply mailing and then downloading the same file made it a pointless exercise.
Well, maybe a hundred kilos of them anyway. Or in other words, 25 to 30 typical double width floppy boxes. 2 or 3 stacks of them each as high as moderately tall man. My entire, quite comprehensive software collection, in the early 90s, took up 3 of those boxes and half a shoebox.
Just look at the calculations above. It'd be a pain in the neck just to install it off CDROM, or a bunch of moderately low capacity flashdrives (say, 256mb), let alone DSHDs. It takes about as long for the data to stream off a physical DVD as it would take to install 3.1 from those discs... and probably about as long to stream it over a domestic broadband connection as to install off a series of CDROMs, except you can leave the former running by itself instead of having to swap CDs every 5 mins.
Ah but you forget having a CD Rom and a CD burner were two separate entities, you still needed them for general saving documents and data plus at the time CDs were more expensive than floppies so it wasn't that uncommon to install Windows 95 via floppy and if I remember correctly even Windows 98 was available through floppy disks kinda sure XP was but I don't quite remember
dont worry about bringing stuff through customs! as long as you dont have stuff in Your carryon, i never had any problems With any single one of my metallic pipe, machine-gun looking replica weapons through airports.. and i troop/cosplay through the 501st.. rifles.. smg's.. pistols.. we have them.. i actually brought an AK47 airsoft through customs last time i was abroad.. no questions asked...
I remember many years ago the dollar store had a bunch of RPGs on floppies. But I had only just gotten a computer and wasn't all that interested. I should have bought them to see what they were. The image on the back looked of one a bit like the NES Dragon Warrior. But I have no idea what it actually was.
To clarify: I have found nothing to suggest that floppy drives are no longer supported regardless of how they interface with the system. USB drives and floppy controllers are both fully supported in windows 8 (and that includes 5.25 drives as they use the floppy controller as with 3.5). The only thing that was dropped (since win XP) was support for formatting floppy discs below 1.44MB
I'd be far more surprised at serial support being dropped than floppy. There's still plenty of real world applications that make use of RS232 (sometimes, you just need to transfer some binary data at low speed over a long distance with the minimum of wiring and protocol-fuss; USB, ethernet etc don't even start to cut it), and most motherboards still have header pins for adding a physical port even though a pre-installed one is a rarity. (USB dongle ports still appear as actual COMs to Windows!)
Ah! The good ol' floppy's If you passed through a silk curtain while holding one, the static electricity would corrupt the data. Also If you bought the cheap ones, reading it immediately after writing would result in corruption too, also sneezing or breathing or the rotation of the earth were sufficient to ruin your day.
I have a collection of floppy that include might and magic 1,2,3 arch on ultra 1,2,3 and some other games. The,might and magic ones seem to be for IBM and anyway I can't find out if they work because I don't have a reader . If anyone has an idea of the price of my collection please tell me.
Even the CD version of Win95, with all the additional games, videos, demos etc that aren't copied to HDD as part of install only comes to about 330mb. Try again. (The actual installation folder, i.e. the only files you actually need for the install and can be demoed as such by copying to some other media by themselves and installing from there, make up about 90mb at most)
They get points for at least putting SOMETHING on it. I was expecting it to be either blank or an old relabeled install disc fished out of a warehouse / dumpster.
You ever tried that? Massive respect if so... Windows really doesn't like loading from floppy and you have to tweak things around to do so. I managed without a HDD for a while and booted Win3.1 off a Zipdisk instead. Had to start the machine using a DOS system floppy that included the Zip drivers, and it would con the computer into thinking it was a hard drive... Actually ran at a fairly decent pace, thanks to how compact 3.1 is! It also works susprisingly well on a 286 with 1152kb of RAM...
Honestly from what I've seen of W8, I don't mind the start menu. I just wish it wasn't full screen. The program Start8 lets the start menu run in a window. I wish that was in the vanilla OS. Making the start menu fullscreen just seems like a step backward IMO
It doesn't need a "cooling off" period or anything (consider that the data rate is on the order of a couple hundred thousand bits per second, after all, and it wasn't unusual to have a "verification" pass after each track was written). But the circuitry and even the mechanical parts can heat up, and both the electrical noise from that heat & expansion of moving parts could affect read accuracy Buying cheap discs is indeed just a flat out bad idea though. Stick to the plain blue or black Sonys..
Cliffnotes edition of the potential argument here: The definition of kilo, mega, giga etc in the computer field is a complex and controvertial one. From a hardware standpoint, people (and geeks, and OS programmers) like to go with powers of two - 2^10, 2^20, 2^30 etc - for KB, MB, GB, as those are convenient amounts to make binary memory in. Marketroids and disc manufacturers like to specify in powers of 10 - 10^3, 10^6, 10^9 - as it's more convenient for them and makes their stuff look bigger.
Hmm ... Just to be sure... Is it definitely 21 sectors x 80 tracks, or 20 sectors x 84 tracks? (vs 18 x 80 for normal discs) Also, is the FAT and root dir structure the same, or simplified and reduced? That takes up a good 16.5kb on a regular disc... I remember the old days of pirates tweaking their disc formats out to e.g. 82x10 on double-density discs (vs 80x9) in order to gain a whopping extra 100k and fit in a game that they just couldn't quite crunch the last 95kb out of :)
Why have you connected a 5.25" to your ST? I mean, I know it can be done, I've seen them on sale for the system, but I've never ever seen the point other than for one-time transfer and archiving of important data from older systems if you're too impatient or simple-minded to use a serial link and transfer software. They only ever supported the single-density 360kb type (rather than the 1.2mb high-density), and no software came on them.
San Diego Comic-Con had an assassins Creed 3 promo, which as an actual ship, made up to look like a pirate ship and it had cannons that they actually shot off which scared the hell out of me because I was on my way to another panel and didn't see it coming
Also, if your ISO shows up as "3.4GB", then that's 3.4 x1024, not x1000. 3.4 x 1024 = 3481.6 3481.6 / 1.39 = 2505 floppies, with a few hundred kb left over on the last one. Though, this being Microsoft, they would probably use their own proprietary 1.64mb (1680kb, or 1663.5 after FAT/etc = 1.625mb) format, and compress the living hell out of the data at the expense of depacking speed/complexity. 3481.6 / 1.625 = 2144 discs. Or probably 2000 (2048?) with good-as-possible compression. 50 hours.
Oh, neat! Well that's some unexpected ticks in Microsoft's box for keeping that support then. Now to dig up a disc from about 1985 and wait 15 months so you can try loading stuff off a 30-year-old piece of media :D
They had a whole treasure chest of those chocolate coins at Rezzed, I can confirm that they were super nice but made me feel extremely ill from eating too many on the way home.
I saw the floppy on the thumbnail and I was like "Oh my God, I haven't seen one in years! Why on Earth did he get one on a Ubisoft promo?" Had to click on the vid to find out XD
Never mind that - has anyone here ever used an 8-inch one? *puts hand up* ...the weirdest thing is, the machine we used those discs for was still running in _2006_. I didn't even start in that particular job until 2004.
The reason the floppy drive worked is it's abstracted as a generic usb storage device - like a usb memory stick thing. I suspect the old PATA style floppy bus is no longer supported on Windows 8, but who knows? So there.
I was hell bent on selling out on my q9650 and it's p5q pro until I saw this video. I don't really want to give up my floppy drive just to run my 840 pro at sata 3 :(
Perhaps a USB Type one does, but if you try to wire on a desktop an actual Floppy drive (Desktop floppy uses the old 34 pin connector) it will not work because the desktop style floppy drives fall under legacy.
And that's not meant as any kind of sleight, by the way. I have a 486SX (with floppy... and 4X CDROM!) under my coffee table for the occasional bit of early-90s fun, and a backup WinXP desktop machine salvaged from work in the back of the utility room. That's about the newest computer I personally know of with a built-in floppy, and it's got to be about 7 years old now, and hasn't been turned on in probably a year.
You don't really need to use the metro interface for anything.... I only used the start button to search for stuff, which now its much easier on win8 imo.
However, a later attempt to get Win95 to run off there (as it's possible to make it fit within the confines of a Zip with some swap space to spare) was a dismal failure. It really really really doesn't want to load off anything other than a permanently installed HDD (or, in one entertaining case, a Compact Flash camera memory card masquerading as one). Though I've yet to try it on a modern machine, booting off a BIOS-recognised USB drive...
Drackar Well I'm referring to the old people who like to keep their potato computer and just upgrade the OS to stay edgy. The chances are that the computer can barely run windows 8.
I remembered playing all sort of pirated GBC games that come in flobby disk like this :D Then GBA came and their ROM couldn't fit in the fobby disk anymore :(
Yes, but you got an awful lot for that - the entire OS and a buttload of utilities, including QBasic, DosShell, EMM386, Smartdrv, Undelete, Defrag, Scandisk etc. And the core system could boot off a 40-track single sided 5.25" with a (tiny) bit of room to spare, let alone a double-sided 80tr or any flavour of 3.5". Made good sense to bodge a bootsector, copy of command.com and edit.com as well onto any HD disc which had sufficient space for it and wasn't likely to fill up further, "just in case"
How we take for granted 1mb is an average size for ONE image nowadays, imagine the countless amount of images and other data that had to be squeezed on to one tiny disk for a game back in the good old days - it doesn't even seem possible now.
Actually most games were stored on multiple cards, as there was not enough storage on one of them to hold the whole game. You are right about taking 1 MB for granted though, as many people including myself have several terabytes worth of storage on our computers.
I used to backup all my documents and pictures on floppy disk. Had about 100 disks and whenever I checked the disks would always find issues and problems. The only useful thing for the floppy disk was taking documents from my home to school and quickly learned to have about three floppy disks with the same files on since corruption was common. I don't miss the floppy disk.
BIOS upgrades can be quite happily done from USB flashdrives now. Particularly as some BIOSes have moved up from 256kb to 1mb (which means you couldn't back up the old one to the same disc), and recently to 4mb (which zaps the possibility of using floppies anyway)... not to mention that they don't seriously expect you to keep one around just for system updates.
i'm kind of impressed they put *anything* on that disk, i was expecting it to just be blank
i know me too.what a waste of time lol. unless they had some ancient disk copier machine, it probably took ages to copy data onto all the floppies. not sure how many they made but i feel bad for whoever had to sit there and copy them one by one. and its not like it really mattered if there was anything on it all, it was just a stupid image, and id bet 99% of people didnt even check it lol
While the content on the disk was a bit underwhelming I still think it was the coolest bit of promotional swag here.
That look Cousin Dan gave said so much without saying a word...
I have a floppy drive! In 2013 I removed a DOS boot loader virus from a floppy using it.
Congratulations on you achievements mate :)
Wow what an achievement!!
Let us all bow down to this man of sheer legend!
He shall be known as the Poon King.
Colonel Sanders Gotta aim for that low hanging fruit ;-)
Low quality chocolate is awesome. I realized this as a kid. Used to be that the store I went to after school had these really low-quality, smallish chocolate bars of the cheapest, worst stuff possible. The funny thing was that because it was so low quality, it always tasted a bit different. Each time was a new experience. I imagine they had absolutely no quality control and mixed the ingredients badly so the proportions were always off.
But yeah, that was one of the joys of my childhood. Admittedly, I had a very poor childhood.
Looking at this five years later and HOLY SHIT COUSIN DAN LOOKS YOUNG!
Windows installation floppies weren't formatted to the standard size. They used a special format called DMF (Distribution Media Format, using 21 sectors per track instead of the typical 18), and could hold up to 1680KB.
2024 floppies, then.
The floppy disk was a stroke of genius on their part. They know old school RPG gamers still have old systems as most older games are DOS or Windows 3.1 compatible only. It's a pretty neat idea.
No, the first edition(s?) of 95 were indeed available on floppy, for the terminally out of date or masochistic. The aforementioned 486SX in my lounge would have been capable of running 95 as I found it (4mb, 120mb HDD and no CD drive!), and as they wanted maximum market penetration they had to support that.
As upgraded (8mb, 420mb HDD, CDROM, sound card, and all possible BIOS speed tweaks) it'd make quite a nice, basic Win95 office or schoolwork rig, even if not very good for games or internet.
Windows 8 doesnt support floppy disk drives... directly. By that I mean, if you have a floppy disk controller built into your motherboard. USB is a totally different beast however, those simply use a universal removal drive system that is supported on windows 8.
mrcannibalfreak by retards you mean people with touch devices? Also, the newest update brought back the desktop, and windows 8 is included on nearly all modern computers now. I personally still use windows 7, and the obfuscation of power tools in windows 8 would infuriate me, but that doesn't mean all windows 8 users are retards xD
Richard Smith Brought back the desktop? The desktop was never gone, it was there in the general release back in October 2012.
So you are saying that there's no drivers for the on-board floppy controllers? To my knowledge I haven't seen a motherboard with a floppy connector in years, so that's why Win8 machines do not seem to support floppies. And the USB floppy drives still have the floppy controller inside them. The USB works as a bridge to make the computer to see the floppy drive.
lBonaCl USB is basically an advanced powered communications port. The data at the end of the day coming off a floppy is no different than any other drive, and would use the same standards as they would.
lBonaCl Unless you have a ide to sata adapter. My motherboard strangely has a ide for floppy, but no ide for HHD's and cd drives.
No intro? You blew it Ashens!
Looks like a teac external floppy drive which I used for installing raid drivers during the Windows XP installation. They can be found on eBay easily.
You say this, and he went to Gamescon, has reviewed multiple gaming devices, did an LP with Guru Larry (and didnt suck at it, both of them did well) and i could go on!
Not forgetting the vast improvement in transfer speeds.
How marvelous the tech is in this day and age, yet in the future we will laugh at it's capabilities like we do a floppy. :D
I still remember the 5 1/2" Floppy Disk. Good old memories of media formats of my childhood
A good estimate is 90 seconds per disc if they're efficiently formatted, in good condition, and you're a goddamn ninja at swapping them right when it's needed.
More realistically, two minutes per disc.
So somewhere between 50 and 68 hours, straight. I'd say 3 whole days doing nothing other than swapping discs, hitting enter, and sleeping.
(You can eat/drink/visit the bathroom between swaps, or possibly even simultaneously by using your other hand if you're reasonably dextrous)
Usually when that sort of thing happens it's because it was a failure because they either didn't get their sales for it in the black or it didn't make the projected sales quota.
It's really depressing but they put so much marketing and other random stuff into these triple AAA games that a good couple million sold isn't good enough.
A lot of the data in the ISO will already be quite well compressed, so you won't get more than a fractional gain. The estimate I made (of reducing from 2500 to 2000 discs through a combination of enhanced compression and a custom format) is probably a bit optimistic if anything.
I can only imagine that the quality control on the floppy was zero because they didn't expect anyone to actually be able to read it.
Back when everything was in kilobytes and the difference was only 2.4% between the two, it wasn't a huge problem if you slipped up and got the wrong one. Bit more significant with megs, rather noticeable with gigs (as it's 7.4%!). I think as we've got up to terabytes, people have just given up, because the numbers are so huge it's hard to be particularly accurate anyway. But a "2TB" hard drive, which holds about 2.0 x 10^12 bytes, only holds 1.82 x 2^40 on the binary scale - nearly 10% "less".
so true, stress balls not really effective unless you throw them at somebody you hate.
Never mind that CD writers and read-only DVDs (or combi DVD/CDRW) drives were not uncommon by the time that XP hit, and a computer comfortably capable of running it - or indeed, 98SE, which balked at the idea of anything much less than 32mb (I think I found 24 was the level at which it really started to complain, and 64~96 was far, far more comfortable) - that didn't have a CD drive, or at least a Zip to copy stuff FROM a PC with one - would have been highly unusual.
Thumbs up if you clicked the video cuz you saw the floppy disk lol
Jared Connell I clicked because I misread "Promo"
+TheLinuxKing suuureee
Harley365 were you born in 2010 or you're just trolling?
Actually there are now 64GB micro SD cards available. And regular SD cards can go up to 256GB now.
I remember Office v4 (the last one before 95) coming on 35 disks... it literally took three hours to install. We made very sure to back that up onto something faster and higher capacity (e.g. Zipdisk) as soon as we had access to such.
Reputedly the non-CD version Windows 95 came on 50+ special high-capacity format (1.68mb) 3.5" floppies ... and a 5.25" version was also available. Jeez.
I actually like the hold music.
A complete hardware-unit such as a floppydisk to carry half a song in 128kps nowadays. Yes, we're improving.
All my PC's have floppy drives, not really for data storage but for emergency BIOS recovery and booting fro simple boot discs. Plus I can transfer stuff to my amiga from the PC using them.
I also have a 250MB zip drive
I think you might be confusing floppies with memory chips. Static did nothing for floppies, as they store their data magnetically, and magnetism isn't generally affected by static electricity. However, if the disc itself carried a charge, that might have affected the drive's ability to read it effectively (solution - ground yourself whilst holding the disc).
The "reading immediately after writing" thing sounds more like your actual drive was on the blink. Once the data's written, it's written.
Darn it my last computer had a floppy drive, but it kicked the bucket about two years now! XC
Pity, though. USB drives are all well and good, but thanks to that abstraction layer, you can't directly access the hardware, which means you're pretty much limited to reading plain DOS-format 1.44mb discs and hoping they're in good condition. If I have a disc in an unusual format or that has even minor damage, and I want to rescue and archive the files off it, I have to use that 486 instead... (or at a pinch, the backup PC, booting into PC-DOS off a live CD so to use properly low-level tools)
I still use an Akai S20 sampler that needs floppy's for storage ! Love the "hold music" much better then a jump-cut !!
After all, a working bare installation of Win7, once finished, is knocking on for 8GB all by itself. I seem to recall Win8 is even larger still.
I'm so glad that you brought M&M X to my attention, I've been waiting years for them to pick up the series again. 6,7 and 8 were some of my greatest gaming memories and I still play them regularly. Ahhh, hopefully they do the series justice. Really excited about this!
One of my friends once thought me how to split a large file (over 1,4 Mb) so you could store it on several floppy disks. I never actually used that skill as simply mailing and then downloading the same file made it a pointless exercise.
loving the floppy...what days those were... :p
Well, maybe a hundred kilos of them anyway.
Or in other words, 25 to 30 typical double width floppy boxes. 2 or 3 stacks of them each as high as moderately tall man.
My entire, quite comprehensive software collection, in the early 90s, took up 3 of those boxes and half a shoebox.
Just look at the calculations above. It'd be a pain in the neck just to install it off CDROM, or a bunch of moderately low capacity flashdrives (say, 256mb), let alone DSHDs. It takes about as long for the data to stream off a physical DVD as it would take to install 3.1 from those discs... and probably about as long to stream it over a domestic broadband connection as to install off a series of CDROMs, except you can leave the former running by itself instead of having to swap CDs every 5 mins.
Ah but you forget having a CD Rom and a CD burner were two separate entities, you still needed them for general saving documents and data plus at the time CDs were more expensive than floppies so it wasn't that uncommon to install Windows 95 via floppy and if I remember correctly even Windows 98 was available through floppy disks kinda sure XP was but I don't quite remember
dont worry about bringing stuff through customs! as long as you dont have stuff in Your carryon, i never had any problems With any single one of my metallic pipe, machine-gun looking replica weapons through airports.. and i troop/cosplay through the 501st.. rifles.. smg's.. pistols.. we have them.. i actually brought an AK47 airsoft through customs last time i was abroad.. no questions asked...
I remember many years ago the dollar store had a bunch of RPGs on floppies. But I had only just gotten a computer and wasn't all that interested. I should have bought them to see what they were. The image on the back looked of one a bit like the NES Dragon Warrior. But I have no idea what it actually was.
To clarify: I have found nothing to suggest that floppy drives are no longer supported regardless of how they interface with the system.
USB drives and floppy controllers are both fully supported in windows 8 (and that includes 5.25 drives as they use the floppy controller as with 3.5). The only thing that was dropped (since win XP) was support for formatting floppy discs below 1.44MB
lol I bobbed my head back and fourth to that "hold music" it was actually quite catchy :)
actually thats compressed its like 12 - 16 gigs uncompressed (iso compresses), so its alot more than 2429 disks, you need like 11429 disks
Can't believe I missed you at Gamescom :C
I'd be far more surprised at serial support being dropped than floppy. There's still plenty of real world applications that make use of RS232 (sometimes, you just need to transfer some binary data at low speed over a long distance with the minimum of wiring and protocol-fuss; USB, ethernet etc don't even start to cut it), and most motherboards still have header pins for adding a physical port even though a pre-installed one is a rarity.
(USB dongle ports still appear as actual COMs to Windows!)
Ah! The good ol' floppy's If you passed through a silk curtain while holding one, the static electricity would corrupt the data. Also If you bought the cheap ones, reading it immediately after writing would result in corruption too, also sneezing or breathing or the rotation of the earth were sufficient to ruin your day.
I have a collection of floppy that include might and magic 1,2,3 arch on ultra 1,2,3 and some other games. The,might and magic ones seem to be for IBM and anyway I can't find out if they work because I don't have a reader . If anyone has an idea of the price of my collection please tell me.
Even the CD version of Win95, with all the additional games, videos, demos etc that aren't copied to HDD as part of install only comes to about 330mb. Try again.
(The actual installation folder, i.e. the only files you actually need for the install and can be demoed as such by copying to some other media by themselves and installing from there, make up about 90mb at most)
They get points for at least putting SOMETHING on it. I was expecting it to be either blank or an old relabeled install disc fished out of a warehouse / dumpster.
that happy felling when you insert the last floppy
That's pretty good, given that the data rate of a typical floppy is more on the order of 1mb/minute.
Don´t copy that floppy.
Or a weird man in a plastic hat will dance on your monitor.
@Liam Jackson it's a reference to an old PSA against software piracy:
th-cam.com/video/up863eQKGUI/w-d-xo.html
Hope this helps after 8 months.
I have a couple hundred floppy discs with the Windows 95 operating system on them... good times, good times.
You ever tried that? Massive respect if so... Windows really doesn't like loading from floppy and you have to tweak things around to do so.
I managed without a HDD for a while and booted Win3.1 off a Zipdisk instead. Had to start the machine using a DOS system floppy that included the Zip drivers, and it would con the computer into thinking it was a hard drive...
Actually ran at a fairly decent pace, thanks to how compact 3.1 is!
It also works susprisingly well on a 286 with 1152kb of RAM...
I remember the days when a basic floppy disc can hold up to 10 full length games.
Darn I'm too damn old.
Ashens, we all know you were the only one in the room and just pretended to throw that stress ball at someone lol
wow you should get a life time honour for that achievement , - life fulfilled -
Masterpiece Megatron suffers this "semi-realistic toy" problem, being a fairly convincing replica of a Walther P-38.
Honestly from what I've seen of W8, I don't mind the start menu. I just wish it wasn't full screen. The program Start8 lets the start menu run in a window. I wish that was in the vanilla OS. Making the start menu fullscreen just seems like a step backward IMO
It doesn't need a "cooling off" period or anything (consider that the data rate is on the order of a couple hundred thousand bits per second, after all, and it wasn't unusual to have a "verification" pass after each track was written). But the circuitry and even the mechanical parts can heat up, and both the electrical noise from that heat & expansion of moving parts could affect read accuracy
Buying cheap discs is indeed just a flat out bad idea though. Stick to the plain blue or black Sonys..
When you put the floppy in I was expecting another proxy series sponsored by Windows 8 or something. :P
Cliffnotes edition of the potential argument here: The definition of kilo, mega, giga etc in the computer field is a complex and controvertial one. From a hardware standpoint, people (and geeks, and OS programmers) like to go with powers of two - 2^10, 2^20, 2^30 etc - for KB, MB, GB, as those are convenient amounts to make binary memory in.
Marketroids and disc manufacturers like to specify in powers of 10 - 10^3, 10^6, 10^9 - as it's more convenient for them and makes their stuff look bigger.
Hmm ... Just to be sure... Is it definitely 21 sectors x 80 tracks, or 20 sectors x 84 tracks?
(vs 18 x 80 for normal discs)
Also, is the FAT and root dir structure the same, or simplified and reduced? That takes up a good 16.5kb on a regular disc...
I remember the old days of pirates tweaking their disc formats out to e.g. 82x10 on double-density discs (vs 80x9) in order to gain a whopping extra 100k and fit in a game that they just couldn't quite crunch the last 95kb out of :)
I remember that game.
The old days!
Why have you connected a 5.25" to your ST? I mean, I know it can be done, I've seen them on sale for the system, but I've never ever seen the point other than for one-time transfer and archiving of important data from older systems if you're too impatient or simple-minded to use a serial link and transfer software. They only ever supported the single-density 360kb type (rather than the 1.2mb high-density), and no software came on them.
A lum stress ball?
San Diego Comic-Con had an assassins Creed 3 promo, which as an actual ship, made up to look like a pirate ship and it had cannons that they actually shot off which scared the hell out of me because I was on my way to another panel and didn't see it coming
Also, if your ISO shows up as "3.4GB", then that's 3.4 x1024, not x1000.
3.4 x 1024 = 3481.6
3481.6 / 1.39 = 2505 floppies, with a few hundred kb left over on the last one.
Though, this being Microsoft, they would probably use their own proprietary 1.64mb (1680kb, or 1663.5 after FAT/etc = 1.625mb) format, and compress the living hell out of the data at the expense of depacking speed/complexity.
3481.6 / 1.625 = 2144 discs.
Or probably 2000 (2048?) with good-as-possible compression. 50 hours.
Oh, neat! Well that's some unexpected ticks in Microsoft's box for keeping that support then.
Now to dig up a disc from about 1985 and wait 15 months so you can try loading stuff off a 30-year-old piece of media :D
What is it about hold music that makes you wanna go on a rampage
Maybe the situations you hear it in.
They had a whole treasure chest of those chocolate coins at Rezzed, I can confirm that they were super nice but made me feel extremely ill from eating too many on the way home.
Omg floppy disks! *Dives into a cloud of nostalgia*
I saw the floppy on the thumbnail and I was like "Oh my God, I haven't seen one in years! Why on Earth did he get one on a Ubisoft promo?" Had to click on the vid to find out XD
I was half expecting someone to kick the door down when that picture was opened.
Legacy is Older software or hardware that has been surpassed by newer things but is difficult to replace because of its wide use.
Oh, and did I forget to mention that 2,429 floppy disks would wind up costing around 1,688 dollars and 88 cents (or 1053.95 pounds)?
good old floppy disks, i still have tonnes of drives that i occasionally use
It would be amazing if you could review Atari ST games.
Imation!! O.O Omgs, I had 2 boxes of them. They were pretty good in the beginning but deteriorated quickly.
Serial ports still work in Windows 8. The one on my mobo is recognized.
Never mind that - has anyone here ever used an 8-inch one?
*puts hand up*
...the weirdest thing is, the machine we used those discs for was still running in _2006_. I didn't even start in that particular job until 2004.
The reason the floppy drive worked is it's abstracted as a generic usb storage device - like a usb memory stick thing. I suspect the old PATA style floppy bus is no longer supported on Windows 8, but who knows? So there.
What, and miss out on all the sweet holding-a-floppy-up-to-the-camera action? Or have to faff about editing-in the screen recorded bit?
I was hell bent on selling out on my q9650 and it's p5q pro until I saw this video. I don't really want to give up my floppy drive just to run my 840 pro at sata 3 :(
Perhaps a USB Type one does, but if you try to wire on a desktop an actual Floppy drive (Desktop floppy uses the old 34 pin connector) it will not work because the desktop style floppy drives fall under legacy.
Ashens... loves... M&M...
Suddenly I'm in love
And that's not meant as any kind of sleight, by the way. I have a 486SX (with floppy... and 4X CDROM!) under my coffee table for the occasional bit of early-90s fun, and a backup WinXP desktop machine salvaged from work in the back of the utility room. That's about the newest computer I personally know of with a built-in floppy, and it's got to be about 7 years old now, and hasn't been turned on in probably a year.
You don't really need to use the metro interface for anything.... I only used the start button to search for stuff, which now its much easier on win8 imo.
However, a later attempt to get Win95 to run off there (as it's possible to make it fit within the confines of a Zip with some swap space to spare) was a dismal failure. It really really really doesn't want to load off anything other than a permanently installed HDD (or, in one entertaining case, a Compact Flash camera memory card masquerading as one). Though I've yet to try it on a modern machine, booting off a BIOS-recognised USB drive...
I sure hope you had a press pass, most of the lines where way to long to do anything.
Mostly hung around hall 8 myself.
He was just referring to Windows 8, which is a OS that does not belong on anything that doesn't have a sensor display.
It accepts USB devices just fine. It does NOT accept normal PC floppy devices.
Chances are if you are using a computer that has a built floppy disk. You probably can't run windows 8.
KillerBillPickle
Even if the computer doesn't come with it, chances are the motherboard still supports the cable.
Drackar We are talking about those big hunky computers that are sorta beige colour. Right?
KillerBillPickle ... No. The last computer I put together had the legacy port needed on the motherboard.
Drackar Well I'm referring to the old people who like to keep their potato computer and just upgrade the OS to stay edgy. The chances are that the computer can barely run windows 8.
I remembered playing all sort of pirated GBC games that come in flobby disk like this :D
Then GBA came and their ROM couldn't fit in the fobby disk anymore :(
@PunisherFran was that a game grumps refrence on an ashens video XD
Yes, but you got an awful lot for that - the entire OS and a buttload of utilities, including QBasic, DosShell, EMM386, Smartdrv, Undelete, Defrag, Scandisk etc. And the core system could boot off a 40-track single sided 5.25" with a (tiny) bit of room to spare, let alone a double-sided 80tr or any flavour of 3.5". Made good sense to bodge a bootsector, copy of command.com and edit.com as well onto any HD disc which had sufficient space for it and wasn't likely to fill up further, "just in case"
How we take for granted 1mb is an average size for ONE image nowadays, imagine the countless amount of images and other data that had to be squeezed on to one tiny disk for a game back in the good old days - it doesn't even seem possible now.
Actually most games were stored on multiple cards, as there was not enough storage on one of them to hold the whole game. You are right about taking 1 MB for granted though, as many people including myself have several terabytes worth of storage on our computers.
+Jon Snow Ever heard of Left 4k Dead? It's a game that was made for a challenge where you had to make games that fit in 4 kilobytes or under.
Some 100 Kbytes for compressed images and 1-10kbyte for Asciiart ^^
I used to backup all my documents and pictures on floppy disk. Had about 100 disks and whenever I checked the disks would always find issues and problems. The only useful thing for the floppy disk was taking documents from my home to school and quickly learned to have about three floppy disks with the same files on since corruption was common. I don't miss the floppy disk.
BIOS upgrades can be quite happily done from USB flashdrives now. Particularly as some BIOSes have moved up from 256kb to 1mb (which means you couldn't back up the old one to the same disc), and recently to 4mb (which zaps the possibility of using floppies anyway)... not to mention that they don't seriously expect you to keep one around just for system updates.
Yes I know, but what do you mean exactly. As showed in this video, floppies obviously still work.
WHERE WAS THE OUTRO?! WHAT IS THIS MADNESS?! HAS THE GAME CHILD TOTALLY FRIED YOUR BRAIN?!