Back of the envelope maths. A floppy disk could attain typically 50 KB/s on a good day ignoring head seeks. 16 GBs of game data would thus take at least 320,000 seconds, or around 90 hours to load, But that's assuming a floppy disk capable of storing 16 GB. If spread across multiple disks, you'd need 11,000 floppy disks. In reality, you'd spend 4 days without sleep swapping 11,000 disks to get the game to run. Loading the next level might take a day and 3,000 floppies.
Would that really have surprised you? I thought life would be like The Jetsons by now when I was a kid in the late 80s/early 90s. Science magazines talked about putting an end to aging.
Reality is often disappointing.
Apparently 1000 bytes per second. Extending my previous calculations (not peer reviewed) that's 5,400 hours to load or 225 days.
yea that would have made more sense to me. I started in the 80s myself. Remember using cassette tapes ?
Man... I guess that was why I never saw anyone playing a game in Starbase alpha (Space 1999). Lol
one of the greatest posts ever. I love floopy disks' physicality: how you insert it into the drive, then there is the sweet sound it makes as it reads and writes, then you eject the disk... Everything is very tactile, so incredible pleasant, almost liquid and satisfying!
If you upgrade to zip drives you can have the click noise always !
That's an issue with the port, as the 'On rails' sections like that are super easy to predict and thus preload.