I'm sure you could do it with a standalone runtime, but it will just be overhead compared to compiling directly to x86, at least for the purposes of this competition. I'm a fan of WASM for a lot of other applications tho
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Well technically since it compiles to wasm you just need a wasm runtime and a rendering system. Not a whole browser. Some people have reported getting wasm-4 games running on microcontrollers.
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)
The best bet is to generate some stuff on the fly or on demand, if you wanna make it 3D
Yes. Most floppies had a write protect tab you would slide to set whether writing was protected or not. However, when buying games some floppies didn't have that tab exposed because the write protection was supposed to be set by the manufacturers when they created them for sale. On some games, they messed up and set the disk write protect to the unprotected setting (thus disabling write protection) on ALL of the disks and not just the disk they intended you to use for saves. If you didn't read carefully, forgot, or were playing a foreign imported game in a language you don't quite understand, you might accidentally write a save onto a disk you weren't supposed to, and the games with this problem usually didn't check to see if there were important files it was overwriting before just writing the save file.
It is mostly an incredibly cool hobby project, nothing that you can daily drive nor something that strives to be daily drivable
WASM-4 would good engine for this. Assuming you don't also have to ship the runtime.
Games are at most 64kb.
Lots of manufacturers called them lots of different things.
What? Floppy disks have physical write protection tabs
Probably possible with no textures, or procgen'd ones.
Good idea, but then you cannot write the save to the floppy. Some older games would disable write protection to every disk instead of just the one you should store saves on. Lead to a lot of problems, you can imagine.
I'd love to see a basic Minecraft clone clock in under 1.44 MB
Boxes with floppies of pirated games.
Good times ☺️
I lived through all 3, and I’ve always called them diskettes. My recollection is they were called that in the original Sony documentation, which appears to be elided from my brief searches this evening.
I’ll chalk it up to colloquial laundering, much like all 8P8C ports and cables now being called ‘Ethernet’.
I think the original Cave Story is between 5-6 MB.
Holy moly, this is insanely awesome. Can this revive Chromebooks and ancient machines? Can it actually play YouTube videos with sound, though?
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
My family's IBM compatible had 5¼" double sided double density disks that held 360KB.
But there was a lot of variations between platforms:
[0]: 3.5” are diskettes, 5.25” and 8” are floppies.
Not a distinction that I ever heard, and I lived thought the 5.25" and 3.5" eras.
The raw capacity of a 1.44MB 3.5” diskette[0] is 2MB, 1MB per side. The FAT12 formatting chews >25% of its usable capacity. I realised this when the ‘backup’ systems for the Super Nintendo could write a 16Mbit cartridge to a single diskette.
This raises the question: Is a console game up to 2MiB eligible?
[0]: 3.5” are diskettes, 5.25” and 8” are floppies.
I love the idea, but it seems like a difficult (but not impossible) limitation. Godot won't make it even with heavy minification of a hello-world, Raylib is more realistic but I think the 3D rendering on its own already puts it above the limit so even untextured 3D is out. So, 2D or write-your-own-engine.
Well, maybe Raylib 3D might work with a static binary via musl, but at that point I'm pretty sure game design and programming would be small steps at that point.
Not with the logic included
IIRC they were more like 170kb? Single sided (single density). I had the C64 ones.
How about an OS and games?
Just don't remove the write protection.