Operating Factorio from over 1,000 floppy disks is a masochistically guide course of that absolutely units a brand new report for recreation load instances
On this age the place AI threatens to do every thing for us, robbing the human race of company, is there a sure masochistic enchantment in deliberately and needlessly making one thing way more sophisticated and guide than common?
This instantly throws up virtually numerous issues, beginning with the circa 1.5 MB capability of a double-sided variant of such a disk and the truth that they are not made any longer.
That is earlier than you even take into consideration the technicalities. Factorio is a really small recreation by fashionable requirements, taking over about 1 GB to 1.5 GB of cupboard space as soon as put in. However that is completely huge if a floppy disk is your metric.
Value is an instantaneous downside, with 10 old-stock floppies apparently costing about $23, you are about $2,500 in floppies including in some spares. Ultimately, DocJade managed to supply 1,250 disks from floppydisk.com for an undisclosed value. They turned out to be previous AOL dial-up web free trial disks, which added as much as 250 years of free AOL dial-up entry, albeit AOL just lately ended that service after 34 years. Pity.
Anyway, DocJade says the straightforward manner to do that could be to make a collection of floppy-sized recordsdata and open them one-by-one in a digital machine. However that, as he says, would imply no utilizing bodily floppies. And that is dishonest.
Another choice is a big RAID array, however you’d want a drive for every disk, which might price over $10,000 and, as he says, “Home windows doesn’t like having a variety of USB gadgets plugged into it.”
So, run the sport from the disks when you may solely have one disk within the drive at a time? This the place issues get very technical. However very lengthy story massively truncated, he wrote his personal file system. Yep, actually. It is dubbed Fluster and was written in RUST.
For many video games, an method like this could be a nightmare. Issues like texture streaming would imply manually finding and retrieving countless non-physically-adjacent floppies. He says many fashionable video games could not address this and would “merely crash”. However Factorio hundreds virtually your entire recreation earlier than hitting the title display screen. So it ought to theoretically work.
Anywho, the Fluster file system divides every disk into 512-byte blocks, with 2,880 blocks per disk. The specifics of Fluster’s file system headers imply it is restricted to about 65,000 disks. However that provides as much as about 90 GB, greater than sufficient for Factorio.
Different particulars embrace the final 4 bytes of each block allotted to a CRC checksum to allow correct disk corruption detection, whereas a pair of 16-bit numbers act as disk pointers, holding observe of all of the blocks. The primary shops the disk quantity for the block, the second the block quantity on the disk. Simples!
From right here, there’s some stuff about inodes used for pointing at recordsdata within the system that is properly past me. After which extra stuff about listing blocks and file extent blocks that is much more past me, however primarily permits recordsdata to be break up up into chunks to allow them to be allotted throughout a number of blocks.
Initially, DocJade used Home windows, not Linux. However as a result of he needed to make Fluster a FUSE file system, however he could not get that to work on Home windows, he switched the entire thing to Linux, or slightly Home windows subsystem for Linux, which had its personal set of issues with issues like USB passthrough.
Preliminary variations of Fluster appeared promising for smaller file sizes. However issues emerged as the info scaled up. Early testing confirmed that writing 1,000 recordsdata with random small sizes to a folder would take practically half one million bodily disk swaps, every individually promoted by disk quantity. Not good!
However after making an attempt a variety of completely different cache methods, DocJade managed to get the entire thing right down to 1,500 disk swaps for loading the sport. He then made up 2,000 customized stickers for the floppies and needed to wipe all 1,250 of the disks manually, with a ten% failure fee for that course of alone. As for truly loading the sport from the disks, that takes over per week, working “dawn to sundown”.
The sport nonetheless is not 100% purposeful attributable to points like Fluster’s lack of assist for locked recordsdata. However pre-saved video games may be launched and the YouTube video reveals it working apparently properly sufficient for DocJade to “beat” Factorio in just a little beneath 9 hours play time.
Rounding this madness out, it is value noting that DocJade is simply 21 years of age. In an ironic sort of manner given the last word frivolity of this endeavour, that is sufficient to have you ever questioning what the heck you have carried out along with your life.
Lastly and for the report, the Fluster file system is now totally open sourced and obtainable on DocJade’s GitHub. So, should you fancy a go you will not even must code your personal file system. Bit too simple then, should you ask me.
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