Factorio From Over 1,000 Floppy Disks Is A Masochistically... Running

In this age where AI threatens to do everything for us, robbing the human race of agency, is there a certain masochistic appeal in intentionally and needlessly making something much more complicated and manual than usual?

That'll a be a huge, 50-storey, fully-carpeted yep according to YouTuber DocJade. He decided that installing and running the construction and management simulation game, Factorio, on a hard drive, like a normal human, is far too straight forward. So, why not use 3.5-inch floppy disks. Like, over a thousand of 'em.

This immediately throws up almost countless problems, starting with the circa 1.5 MB capacity of a double-sided variant of such a disk and the fact that they're not made any longer.

That's before you even think about the technicalities. Factorio is a very small game by modern standards, taking up about 1 GB to 1.5 GB of storage space once installed. But that's absolutely massive if a floppy disk is your metric.

Cost is an immediate problem, with 10 old-stock floppies apparently costing about $23, you're looking at about $2,500 in floppies adding in some spares. In the end, DocJade managed to source 1,250 disks from floppydisk.com for an undisclosed price. They turned out to be old AOL dial-up internet free trial disks, which added up to 250 years of free AOL dial-up access, albeit AOL recently ended that service after 34 years. Pity.

Anyway, DocJade says the easy way to do this would be to make a series of floppy-sized files and open them one-by-one in a virtual machine. But that, as he says, would mean no using physical floppies. And that's cheating.

Another option is a huge RAID array, but you'd need a drive for each disk, which would cost over $10,000 and, as he says, "Windows does not like having a lot of USB devices plugged into it."

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So, how to run the game from the disks when you can only have one disk in the drive at a time? This where things get very technical. But very long story hugely truncated, he wrote his own file system. Yep, really. It's dubbed Fluster and was written in RUST.

For most games, an approach like this would be a nightmare. Things like texture streaming would mean manually locating and retrieving endless non-physically-adjacent floppies. He says many modern games couldn't cope with this and would "simply crash". But Factorio loads almost the entire game before hitting the title screen. So it sh

Source: PC Gamer