If you could only have 1GB of entertainment data, what would it be?
If you could only have 1GB of entertainment data, what would it be?
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.
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.
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
Books, lots and lots of books.
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.
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.
Tons of epubs of books and TTRPGs, with dice rolling software. Classic SNES, NES, N64, GB, GBC, and GBA games, romhacks, and emulators. Storage-efficient MP3s of a few albums like Drukqs that get better with repeated listening, and classical, impressionist, and other such music. A photo of my fiancé.
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.
A few assumptions:
- There will be some sort of PC available, with a keyboard and mouse and speakers, and basic programs to play audio/video, read text/PDF documents, etc. that don't count toward my 1GB limit
- I will have knowledge ahead of time about this PC and its specs, OS, installed programs, etc.
First, I'd make sure to include a stripped down version of 7zip, or whatever compression I use (y'all don't wanna get on there and realize you can't decompress your files). Hopefully only a few MB for a CLI utility.
Second, I'd include a decent library stored in a compressed text format. Some fiction, some non-fiction, classics, some of my favorite series, a bunch of "Intro to ___" type of books, that kind of thing. Probably up to 50MB or so.
Third, I would include some low-quality audio of some favorite music as well as a few audio books. Maybe 200MB or so.
Fourth, I'd include a copy of a simple game engine system (maybe something like libgdx) as well as Inkscape, and whatever compiler I would need to create programs/games for my PC, and relevant documentation. This would give me both a creative outlet, and allow me and my companion to make new games for each other to have something novel. Hopefully around 100 or 200MB.
Depending on the size, I might also consider including something like FruityLoops, again to be able to create new content. Ideally something that's 100MB or so.
With whatever space I have left (300 or 400MB-ish), I'd include things like emulators and a couple favorite older games (Lord of the Realms 2 comes to mind) that have good replay value and would be small enough to fit. Ideally some multi-player options as well (assuming a shared keyboard).
Without previous knowledge of the available PC, I'd include multiple builds of 7zip for most common architectures, and prioritize the books and audio. Maybe bring a couple variants of GCC and minGW (if I can write programs, I can eventually replicate lots of the other software).
Porn
50/50 chance amirite
A super hi-fidelity version of Darude’s « Sandstorm »
well; if I start with this: https://www.hvsc.c64.org/downloads Which is 58K songs in 80MB (which is enough to last several lifetimes)
Or I could get a mod tracker and some files from ftp://ftp.modland.com/pub/playlists/ and I would have the ability in a few 100 MB to make the type of music I enjoy (It would take 150GB to get every sample of every sound used in the entire world)
Hit up https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php if you want a bunch of awesome demos ranging from 32 bytes all the way up to 32KB per
unxz.c is 60KB of code and everything you need to build it from source (with literally nothing but hex) only takes up 1.4MB of space https://github.com/oriansj/stage0-posix/
and with unxz, untar and ungz basically Text compresses extremely well and you'll have a hundred lifetimes of books thanks to https://gutenberg.org/
But movies like S1m0ne (2002), Sneakers (1992) and Colossus - The Forbin Project (1970) could also fit too.
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I know, I know, RAM, not actually storage, but still.
Give me Emacs, gcc, binutils, Python, bash, FORTH, js, ncurses, and Cataclysm DDA, etc etc.
It would be fun to really dive deep into CDDA both playing/modding but also to reinvent the entire game. Like what if a rogue-like were on a curved interior cylinder? What if it wasn't dystopian but instead a more pseudo utopian world builder in an O'Neill cylinder.
Yeah, I would have forever unlimited games. I might even explore all of CDDA once.
50% books maximum compression 25% music 128kb or maybe 96kb 25% video, cartoons compress the best, very low quality audio, very low resolution, very low framerate. Probably my favorite episodes from Futurama, Bluey.
I'd rather have loads of shitty quality content than a few choice pristine copies of high quality stuff.
I might also consider reducing each of those by half and including One of the smaller 250-500mb LLM and have it draft out ideas for stories and sit around writing code to make it generate content.
Lots of epub files!
A zip file full of text files containing a ton of knowledge necessary to complete the journey, and a bunch of books. Maybe an emulator and a few nes games.
Animal Well is 30mb. That's my start.
Welp...Slay the Spire is apparently 1gb installed, so it'll probably be that
That’s only about 5% of the text of Wikipedia. Maybe I’ll take just the top 100k articles.
About 250mb worth of pics of the fam, in low res, a copy of Predator in 240p which I guess would be another 250mb, low quality music for another 250mb, and 250mb of a nes emulator and nes roms. Once all out together i wouldplay around with all of this and fit in some Star Trek, Andromeda, and Toast of London episodes.
flcl in 240p. the shittiest version to fit size constraints of john frusciante's The Empyrean & glassjaw's my color green and coloring book
As many episodes of Futurama I can fit in.
MIDIs of my favourite melodies, some actual music, probably just my favourites from my playlists over the years, ASCII encoded books and ROMs of old games with an emulator
Valhiem is just 1gb. Just saying...
Your mom.
Halo CE should be around 600mb.
OK, it seems I can bring my current music library. I experimented with it a bit now, and I guess I could get used to 12kbps Opus or 12.65kbps AMR-WB (they sound comparable). It kinda sounds like off-tuned FM radio, not the much more awful artifacts of MP3 or AAC.
Although... can I bring a cassette tape player? It's analog, so tapes won't fall under this limit. Then I could possibly digitize it. Similarly with movies on film. I don't know what equipment I can take though. Movies on film, photos on paper, books on paper, music on tapes, hmmm... I guess that would be some games then. What counts under the media though? Just the games themselves, emulation software, entire OS?
I would have 1 Call of Duty asset.
Amateur stills.
Use 150mb to put a low quality version of Firefly that I used to have on a Nokia phone around 2007/2008, and the rest will be my collection of ebooks.
I've got more than 1gb of books, but I can trim down the file size by stripping formatting and saving as plain text, and there's a few series I could go without reading for a long time.
Mannnnn morrowind is 1.5 :( I guess I'd get a shit ton of retro Roms and emulators (edit: AND DOOM + MODS!)
For sure games since they offer a lot of replayability. Maybe some reaading materials since they also don't occupy a lot of space.
music encoded in xiph.org's ogg opus