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.

  • Quik@infosec.pub
    431·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • I Cast Fist
    18·
    2 months ago

    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

    • zod000@lemmy.ml
      3·
      2 months ago

      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 Cast Fist
        3·
        2 months ago

        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!

        • zod000@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 months ago

          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.

  • Sequentialsilence@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 months ago

    Random name, npc, map generators for tabletop roleplaying. It’s just text and lookup tables. You can fit a lot of that in 1gb.

      • Takumidesh@lemmy.world
        3·
        2 months ago

        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.

  • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
    16·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    15·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • DarkCloud@lemmy.world
    14·
    2 months ago

    A guide to learning a programming language and a compiler for said programming language. Maybe Godot.

  • ripcord@lemmy.world
    13·
    2 months ago

    One of those compressed Wikipedia dumps, and a whole bunch of retro games. And several MB of text-only ebooks. Compressed of course.

  • j4k3@lemmy.world
    12·
    2 months ago
    -

    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.