Although it’s been decades since we got rid of floppy disks in our daily lives, there are those who still use them as a hobby or personal challenge. The case that we are going to talk about next has to do with a Reddit user who has use a three and a half inch floppy disk as a storage device for Steam. To no one’s surprise, few games have been found to weigh less than 1 MB.
For those of you who are curious as to which storage devices Steam supports for installing games, you might be glad to know that today it is still It is even possible to configure a floppy disk to be able to play your Steam games. Of course, you will have to take your time to find one that does not exceed one megabyte of space. However, this user (u/Retrocet) has achieved it with the help of another redditor (u/sedridor107).
In search of a game that weighs less than 930KB
Image: Reddit (u/Retrocet)
It should be noted that when you configure a floppy disk as a storage device in Steam (or practically any other device), part of that space is dedicated to storing the libraries necessary for its operation, including ‘steam.dll’. This would occupy a ridiculous size on a traditional hard drive or SSD, although on a floppy disk it is already something that is quite noticeable.
Of 1.44 MB available on the three-and-a-half-inch floppy disk, the user had to look for a game that weighed less than 930 KB. While the only lightweight thing he could find was the ‘Lossless Scaling’ (2.6 MB) window to full screen scaling tool, another user ended up suggesting ‘Penny Black’, a text-based video game that it only occupies about 200 KB.
‘Penny Black’, a video game that occupies about 200 KB of space. Image: Steam
According to the game’s description, it has about 25,000 words of dialogue and can be completed in just about two hours. It is a dating sim developed in BBC Basic for Windows. In fact, of the 90 reviews the game has at the time of writing, 94% of them are positive. It seems like the perfect game for this little experiment.
In the world of videogames, size is certainly not important. In fact, works such as ‘Stardew Valley’, ‘Undertale’, or ‘The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth’, considered great phenomena of the independent scene, barely require more than 500 MB of space. Of course, you are going to be disappointed if you want to install them on a floppy disk.
Image | vincent botta
In Genbeta | This is how Counter Strike has been modified to bring information to Russia about the war in Ukraine: there are even Slavic-style cities