You are going away, to some place isolated… in space, of course. You will only be around one other person. You can take an allotment if 1GB of personal media with you (text, video, music, games, pics, etc.) that you will be able to access in your free time indefinitely at will.
The other person will also take 1GB with them, but you won’t be able to talk to them until you’re on the journey.
You will have access to any knowledge resources to perform your function and keep you alive. You will never return to a point where you can get new external media. Any additional media you ever access would have to be created by you and or your travel partner with what you have access to.
You will also not know the sex of your partner, but they have willingly taken the same risks to embark on the journey as yourself, and will have a similar mission.
ROMS of retro games.
Bro forgot to bring an emulator… Enjoy staring at binary code or something.
wouldnt be an issue if you have the hardware to run said roms.
The real fun is doing software emulation running inside your mental calculations.
You get used to it, I don’t even see the code. All I see is Red Plumber. Coin. Mushroom. Pipe.
Text of an average book is 100,000 letters; with a very smart and optimized compression/prediction algorithm (which hopefully is far smaller than 1GB), it is reasonable to expect a single char to be less than half a byte in size, so 50kB per book (saving without covers of course), this would mean around 20,000 books in a GB (not really, the compression algorithm probably also takes quite some MBs)— which should be enough for quite some time.
Even 7zip can compress a large text file to less than 25% of it’s original size. The installer is less than 2MB. There are even better compression algorithms for text than 7zip though.
Text of an average book is 100,000 letters;
I’m not sure where you’re getting that value. The low end of word count for a novel is 50,000. If we say the average word is only 5 characters, we’re looking at a quarter million letters and another 50,000 spaces for a short novel (200-250 pages). Throw in some more for punctuation and formatting, of course. If you’re a fan of big epic fantasy/sci-fi you’re probably closer to a million words.
Books!
If you ignore the covers, 1GB could have 1000’s of books.
My ebpubs are 2,700 files at 1.5GB. And that’s with all the extra crap like JPGs and tons of dupes. I could read forever on 1GB.
Exactly
But then how would we judge them?
When you take file sizes into account, EBooks are the most high-density entertainment you can bring. Followed by old-school games, then music, then video.
I would probably choose my favourite movie in SD, a few dozen of my favourite songs, a few dozen old school games, and then fill out the rest with a few hundred ebooks.
Variety can be way more valuable than pure quantity.
Let’s see, a portable or ripped version of games:
- Age of Empires 2 (there’s an old one that was around 170mb with the expansion),
- Daggerfall (~150mb),
- Worms Armageddon (~300mb, can be reduced by removing some speech sets),
- Doom + some mods and modding tools (let’s allot 200mb for that)
That’s ~820mb thus far. Let’s grab Snes9x (~1mb), Secret of Mana 2 (~3mb), Super Bomberman 3 (~800kb), Super Mario All Stars + Super Mario World (~1.3mb). Also get a GBA emulator, Harvest Moon Friends of Mineral Town, Pokemon Fire red + some romhacks. Let’s assume all this emulation came to a grand total of 50MB. 870MB used, some 130 left.
For that final stretch, books on programming, the full offline documentation and a respective compiler for said language. Going with TinyCC would leave plenty of room for the books, but i’d also have to write most graphic related stuff from scratch… FreePascal has amazing documentation, but the compiler is 50mb or more. Nim is small and fast, but documentation is all over the place and anything graphical needs an external library. Guess I’ll have to contend with some form of javascript. I’d still bring at least one great book on C coding + TinyCC just in case
Wasn’t the full Daggerfall install was actually closer to 400MB. I remember I bought a second HDD just to house Daggerfall since not loading anything from CD made it crash less.
Edit: Just forgot to mention that I love how detailed this list is and you are basically describing my late 90s PC, except it was Turbo Pascal and slightly older versions of Worms and RTS games.
I suspect there’s a ripped version of Daggerfall that removes some or all of the FMV and that would give a significant reduction of space (much like AoE2 at only 170mb). The GOG installer comes at 176mb, so I’ve probably alloted too little space for it either way. Good thing there’s enough wiggle room in further reducing the size of either Worms or Doom mods
Also, the fun thing about going with FreePascal is that I could, in theory, make new GBA games to run on the emulator!
That’s interesting about using FreePascal for that, I didn’t know there was any toolchain to compile to that SoC. I actually wrote a small set of libraries that ran on top of an existing, but very bare) SDK back in the day for writing GBA games in C. I forgot to grab it and rehost it when Google Code went away and it is now lost to time.
I guess raw text files of books would be the best bang for your buck.
Compress those suckers!
Something like Project Gutenberg would fit well here. You’d never run out of books for the rest of your life.
Books, lots and lots of books.
Your comment made me think of that scene from The Matrix. Idk if that was intentional or not, but I liked it enough to ask an AI to make the image above.
Since size is paramount, I’d probably fill about half of this space with NES, GB, and SNES roms and the emulators to play them as well as a few highly replayable classic PC games (CIv, SIm City, X-Com, Warcraft 2, Doom) and some small programs to edit/create images, and a small compiler and text editing tool (maybe Pascal based as another commenter suggested). The rest would be filled with a tremendous amount text books in a compressed archive, both fiction and non-fiction.
Books have the highest density of information per GB… So Books is…
status of “Books”
isntis
One of those compressed Wikipedia dumps, and a whole bunch of retro games. And several MB of text-only ebooks. Compressed of course.
English Wikipedia is about 22gb without media.
That’s compressed, and plain text compress very well.
For my master’s final project I downloaded the English Wikipedia and after unzipping it grew quite large. I don’t remember the total size, also it was 2018, it will be larger now.
“after unzipping it grew quite large”
Heh.
As many digital books as possible and an emulator with as many old school games as possible assuming I have access to a way to play them.
This is 4kb.
Just saying.
kkrieger is 128kb, try it… still mind blowing and from the times of Doom3!!!
No … that’s 4k not 4kb
Seems you didn’t read the description. The executable that produced that output was 4 kilobytes in size.
It’s 4kb it’s the demo scene.
To expand, the rendered to video output is much more than 4k, but the file that produces the output can be small like that, this is usually done by doing a bunch of math to generate the output dynamically.
You can kind of equate it to how a video game can generate 120 frames of 4k footage every second indefinitely, but the game itself is limited in size.
Recording the output takes up space, but you don’t need to record it if you can generate it in demand.
No it is 4kb.
Thanks for incorrecting me.
The entire NES amd GB catalog and 200mb of N64 titles
You just skipped the entire SNES catalog for some N64 titles?
Ebooks.
It’s still probably not close to enough for my ebooks, but at least it makes a dent. Even terrible quality video adds up fast.
Random name, npc, map generators for tabletop roleplaying. It’s just text and lookup tables. You can fit a lot of that in 1gb.
