[HN Gopher] The Commodore Penny Farthing Adventures
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       The Commodore Penny Farthing Adventures
        
       Author : erickhill
       Score  : 40 points
       Date   : 2025-02-09 21:24 UTC (3 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.amigalove.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.amigalove.com)
        
       | aa-jv wrote:
       | Love these old stories.
       | 
       | Back in the 80's in Southern California, I remember making weekly
       | trips to the local "Software Bank" shops, wherein thousands of
       | floppy disks full of shareware and other goodies was traded,
       | record-shop style, in a kind of local swap mart. It had a very
       | solid social aspect - often there were other kids like me,
       | browsing the wares, flipping past endless rows of 5.4" (and later
       | 3.5") floppy disks, looking for interesting and new software to
       | hack around with.
       | 
       | I really have a lot of nostalgia for those days - it was a time
       | when computing was young and special and quite adventurous. Of
       | course, we are still special and adventurous, just not so young.
       | 
       | Recently, during a dumpster diving mission, I found myself in the
       | posession of 3,000 brand new/unused pre-formatted 3.5" floppy
       | disks, which I have been slowly distributing among my circles to
       | anyone who needs them. However, the space they occupy is needed
       | and the pace of distribution is too slow .. so I've been
       | considering making a floppy-based 'zine, just for the fun of it.
       | 
       | Trouble is, what to put on the 'zine, how to craft it to make it
       | interesting, and so on. Does anyone even have a floppy drive any
       | more? (Rhetorical question - in my retro-computing circles, this
       | is sort of a dumb question, since everyone is switching to GoTek
       | ..)
       | 
       | So, HN, what would a modern 3.5" floppy disk-based 'zine look
       | like, in your opinion? Would you pay $2 for it? I'm thinking
       | PoC||GTFO in spirit, inasmuch as it'd have to be multi-platform
       | and somewhat of a quine .. just .. _what_ should it be about?
        
         | gxd wrote:
         | They could be about modern retro games and modern retro synth
         | music (Adlib, SID, PSG audio etc) - and by that I mean games
         | and music targeting the classic platforms but made today. A
         | single 3.5" floppy won't fit many games, but it would fit
         | screenshots and a dozen tunes or so.
         | 
         | It would be the expected text+pics+music. If you charged $2 for
         | it people wouldn't be too interested; if you had a pretty
         | label, simple packaging and charged $10-$15 (the price of a
         | magazine) for it, you could have an audience.
        
           | TheAmazingRace wrote:
           | I could also see the floppy as a fun way to challenge indie
           | developers to make tiny games that fit on the diskette. If
           | it's something like a DOS game, put a DOSBox wrapper on it
           | too, then you can have a game that spans many generations of
           | PC hardware.
        
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