Your most embarrassing floppy thread

[abstauber]

This just came to my mind... I think everyone has still some hidden memories from their early days of computing, locked somewhere in the basement.

I'll want to share this one:

The first one is Flight Simulator 2 for Amiga. It features a cool cracktro with some heavy metal music (Judas Priest?) and the combat mode, which for me was the only fun aspect in the game.

The second disc is also Flight Simulator 2, bought by my dad, who actually liked it on the amiga. But this time for the Atari ST and lacking the combat mode (or it had a different key combination  : )
Also the annoying position of the Atari's mouse/joystick-ports has to be mentioned to understand, what I did here 

1) We already owned Flight2
2) 10 Floppy Discs cost 30 to 40 DM back in 1987 (around 15 euro)
3) Flight2 sucks even more on the Atari, because you had to lift the computer and switch mouse and joystick in order to play it - and reverse it to play something else
4) It doesn't even have a cracktro

So without further explanation


That was the day, my dad explained the difference between copy and original to me...
I feel a little moronic

[GarageGothic]

Not embarassing per se, but I spent A LOT of time drawing game logos on my pirated Amiga floppies. These aren't even all that elaborate, but they're the only ones I have at my house at the moment, the rest are at my mother's place. I wish I had my disks for The Untouchables and The Colonel's Bequest here to show you, I more or less drew the entire cover/title screen on those.

[m0ds]

Sadly, I had to throw all my old floppy's away last year. I think my fondest memories of games I ever owned on floppy, of which there were very, very few, would have to be Castle of Dr Brain and Beneath A Steel Sky.

Days of floppy were funny. I remember in school we just used to nick each others important floppy discs and smash them on the ground. This led to a lot of trouble! A particular floppy disc with a particularly sensitive document on it found its way to the person that should never have seen it too.

I was wondering, as I read your thread abstauber, about floppy days gone by and whether I miss them, or their crappy charm or just the "days of floppy". But no. I don't.

May floppy disks burn in hell, and the memories I have of them fall into a similarly hot vat of molten lava. The only thing I will say is that BASS was probably the most reliable set of floppys I owned, and we were amazed they could fit that game on them - especially with its "seemingly" 3D opening sequence.

[Oliwerko]

The floppy version had the shortened intro and was not talkie, right?
How many disks it was?

[Andail]

I remember playing BASS and monkey island with floppies, and most of the time was spent on watching loading screens and searching for the right disk. For some reason, many of these large games weren't constructed so that a series of adjacent screens could be loaded from the same disk, but instead seemed spread out randomly over the disks.

But Abstauer, I feel a bit dumb here but I actually don't really understand your post. What was the embarrassing episode? I think I need the "further explanation"-version.

[SSH]

Must..... resist...... obvious.... joke.........

[Layabout]

I have moved houses, countries, and back again, so my old floppys are most likely at the bottom of a dump. I had loads. A bunch of pirated stuff for the C=64 on the 5.12, then basically all the games I got bought for me as a kid. Things like Space Quest, Kings Quest, Eco Quest, Dr Brain. KQ 6 have about 15 discs. I remember that. Huge game for the time. Half of it was for the intro methinks.

[AGA]

I used to have Windows 95 on floppy. It took something ridiculous like 26 of them. Windows 7 now takes up most of a DVD. Progress!

[abstauber]

Andail, here's some explaination
* individual way of spelling Bubble Bobble
* erasing Flight Sim 2 in favour of P.O.W (a cheesy clone of Operation Wolf)
* deleting a 200 DM game in general
* a nice and clean handwritten message, that this disc is now intended for amiga
(there's indeed a sequel of this FlightSimulator 2 affair, which I'll post when I find that floppy too)

In general I've started the thread to exhibit some sins of the childhood/youth/whatsoever... e.g. spelling mistakes, mis-punched 5 1/4" floppys, handdrawn labels of teenage queen poker and so on.

About floppys in general
What happens, if your 1 TB hdd crashes? Do you still have backups on your USB sticks, the today's floppy substitute? Or what will be in 20 years, will that hdd ever spin up again? So for the (unwanted) archiving value, floppys did a good job.

I don't know if I'd have been clever enough to create CD-R/DVD backups at the age of eight

[m0ds]

Hehee! Buble Buble! :p

[Layabout]

Does that disc play catchy jazzy/lounge tunes?!

[abstauber]

Lol, it should have 

But here's, what the first disk did:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sxv3p5QpmZ4

[LimpingFish]

I still have a box of Atari ST disks somewhere. They smell like the early 90's.

Lots of Ocean "Hit Squad!" budget re-releases. Bubble Bobble, Chase HQ, Shadow Warriors, Batman, etc. Some US Gold "Kixx" re-releases too; Strider, Turrican, Tusker...

And Cannon Fodder!

[Renal Shutdown]

I had a relatively large stash of floppies, which I'd spend ages on the labels.  Half the time I'd spend longer on the labels than I would playing the games.

I was far worse with the wonderful world of VHS, though.  3 (sometimes 4) movies on the cassette, thanks to using long play not standard play.  I'd spend hours designing the labels, so that the fonts of the 3 movie titles would blend together nicely.

Then a week later, I'd have a new label to draw.

[Andail]

Kk, I'm getting it now.

I think I woke up on the I-don't-get-it side of the bed this morning. This feeling was amplified by SSH's post about an obvious joke.

Then at around 5 pm I got some more sleep and suddenly the world was crystal clear.
Except for SSH's obvious joke.

[Pumaman]

Then at around 5 pm I got some more sleep and suddenly the world was crystal clear.
Except for SSH's obvious joke.

SSH is just using humour to cover up his shame about last time it happened to him...

[Evil]

I used to have Windows 95 on floppy. It took something ridiculous like 26 of them. Windows 7 now takes up most of a DVD. Progress!

I've got Windows 3.0 on floppy, unopened in it's original box with the original shrinkwrap still on it. I have no idea why I'm keeping it.

[Ghost]

I've got Windows 3.0 on floppy, unopened in it's original box with the original shrinkwrap still on it. I have no idea why I'm keeping it.

To remind you of the good ol' times?

[Andail]

I used to have the entire Internet on floppies.
Damn was it tedious to surf the web back then!

[abstauber]

So that's a floppy too?  :o