this post was submitted on 18 Jul 2026
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Game Development

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[–] ChanchoManco@lemmy.zip 13 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Whoever designed the poster didn't see a floppy disk on their lives.

[–] Vex_Detrause@lemmy.ca 6 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Maybe it's a regurgitate essence of a floppy disk by AI.

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

That AI ought to be stuck on a floppy for a few years to teach it some manners.

[–] melsaskca@lemmy.ca 5 points 2 days ago

I remember installing "PowerBuilder" onto my machine back in the day. It was 22 floppy discs to get the complete enterprise edition installed.

[–] unknownuserunknownlocation@kbin.earth 38 points 4 days ago (2 children)

MS Teams just had a panic attack.

[–] tanisnikana@lemmy.world 14 points 4 days ago (1 children)

Teams does that even when running entirely unconstrained.

[–] Wiz@midwest.social 7 points 4 days ago

Plus, it lets you cook an egg in the surface of your laptop.

[–] rustydrd@sh.itjust.works 5 points 3 days ago

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!

[–] Kolanaki@pawb.social 16 points 3 days ago (3 children)

Procedural generation.

Procedural generation everywhere.

[–] OtakuAllTheWay@sh.itjust.works 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Yeah .kkrieger a 3d FPS is only 96 KB and it achieved that with procedural generation.

https://youtu.be/2NBG-sKFaB0

[–] unit327@lemmy.zip 2 points 3 days ago

quod is even more impressive at 64kb https://daivuk.itch.io/quod

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[–] devilish666@lemmy.world 13 points 3 days ago (4 children)

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

[–] AnUnusualRelic@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

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.

[–] Goodlucksil@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] toxicbubble@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

can confirm i used to burn snes roms on floppy

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[–] prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

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

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Best I can do is 60GB of AI generated assets for my farming/life simulator

[–] unit327@lemmy.zip 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

That's enough for at least 22 copies of QUOD

[–] titanicx@lemmy.zip 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

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.

[–] raze2012@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago

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

[–] Sludgehammer@lemmy.world 19 points 4 days ago (2 children)

I think I can hear .kkrieger laughing scornfully.

[–] unit327@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

I can hear QUOD laughing at .kkrieger's pitifullly large filesize

[–] ICastFist@programming.dev 1 points 2 days ago

To be fair, .kkrieger came out in 2004 :)

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[–] RightHandOfIkaros@lemmy.world 16 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago) (6 children)

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, leading to a broken game if the save file is put on the wrong floppy.

[–] Doomsider@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago

I remember getting excited by games with multiple disks. I think Wing Commander was six.

[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 24 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

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.

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[–] tigeruppercut@lemmy.zip 3 points 3 days ago

Just think how much more breathing room people coding for boot sector games would have

https://ish.works/bootsector/bootsector.html

[–] frunch@lemmy.world 9 points 4 days ago

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

[–] HexesofVexes@lemmy.world 6 points 3 days ago (2 children)
[–] Prathas@lemmy.zip 4 points 3 days ago (2 children)

Holy moly, this is insanely awesome. Can this revive Chromebooks and ancient machines? Can it actually play YouTube videos with sound, though?

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[–] taiyang@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

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.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 3 days ago (1 children)

IIRC they were more like 170kb? Single sided (single density). I had the C64 ones.

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[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 4 points 3 days ago (1 children)

We had hundreds with pirated games for our C64. Alongside miles of printouts to see which game is on which disk.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago

Boxes with floppies of pirated games.

Good times ☺️

[–] HumanOnEarth@lemmy.ca 9 points 4 days ago (4 children)
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[–] vala@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

WASM-4 would good engine for this. Assuming you don't also have to ship the runtime.

https://wasm4.org/

Games are at most 64kb.

[–] xthexder@l.sw0.com 5 points 3 days ago (3 children)

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)

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[–] mikenurre@lemmy.world 7 points 4 days ago (2 children)

How about a full 100MB to honor the late not-so-great Zip drive?

[–] insomniac_lemon@lemmy.cafe 1 points 8 hours ago

210 MiB for a mini-CD, 155 MB for a low-density mini-CD, 30-100MB for business card CD (b-card) and there were actually some games released in this format.

I don't know about actually getting such niche formats though, so I could also see a normal CD being used for multiple games (even more with shared assets/libraries). Or perhaps placing high enough in a contest like this, they author it for you onto the disc (with disc+mini-case art) for you.

[–] MurrayL@lemmy.world 10 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

And, to further honour the Zip drive, every game submitted must be corrupt and unreadable.

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