Well, we can be happy, that diskettes weren`t replaced by Zip- and Jaz-Diskettes. :-D
Imagine the Box, if Witcher 3 was published on Zip-Diskettes. :-D

I never remember seeing or having a 2Mb or 2.88Mb floppies. Although i certainly wanted some :P

On the other hand you could reprogram them while reformatting to add more space by removing a little of the buffering it used between sectors, to get 1.88Mb i think. I'd have to look it up.

Hmmm i wish they were. Although remember CD's and DVD's are still more popular because they are cheaper to manufacture.

I remember having 100Mb Zip disks... nothing to do with the zip format :P Iomega...

I'm just glad they didn't replace the zip with button fly.





And the award for dumbest joke ever in this forum goes to tinyE! :D

Depends on if one is looking for the practical answer or more pedantic one I guess. Dual-sided disks aren't popular and never were because you have to either flip them over or have specialized hardware that can read both sides. In addition to that they are much more expensive to produce, and since most hardware is single-sided it presents an inconvenience to use. So for the most part dual-sided disks are an anomaly that was generally only used on DVD video, often having for example the theatrical release on one side and the director's cut on the other side or similar. As such, the entire DVD industry pretty much stuck with using single sided disks which were cheap to produce in volume and double-sided dual-layer disks are for all intents and purposes a very rare anomaly.

As far as I'm aware, any DVD player can read the dual sided discs so that shouldn't be an issue. The issue is that practically nothing ever used dual-sided disks.

The thing is though that we're in a video game forum talking specifically about how much size video games take up, so the context is what size DVDs are in use in the PC video game industry. In that context almost all games come on 4.3GB standard single-layer single-sided disks because those are the cheapest to produce. Games that are larger than 4.3GB are much more likely to come on 2 or more 4.3GB disks than they are to come on a dual-layer disk or some other unusual expensive aberration. I don't even recall ever seeing a single PC video game come on a dual layer 9GB disc for that matter let alone a dual-sided dual-layer one, and I doubt any company would have ever produced one like that either simply because it would be much more expensive to do so.

So yeah, 17GB DS-DL DVD exists on paper as part of the DVD standards, and video discs have been produced in that format, but it isn't really relevant to video game distribution.

Similarly standard CDROM formats hold 650-700MB of data. The raw disk holds more data than that, and there are other oddities in CDROM form such as being able to record up to 800MB of data on many DVD burner drives with certain brands of recordable media. You wont find a video game distributed on that though either, and will instead find games that are more than 650MB in size split across multiple CDROMs that are themselves each 650MB max in size. Again, the reasons for this just like with DVD are the costs involved as well as maximizing compatibility with as much hardware as possible out there to avoid costly refunds at the cash register.

Update: Incidentally, while it might be useful to indicate that 17GB discs can exist, my reason for commenting about this is that if mentioning 17GB discs exist I think it is equally important to state that they are uncommon and generally unused, specifically with respect to video games. If someone is using this information to mentally think about how many discs a game could be distributed on in a practical sense, thinking that 17GB discs are common in the PC video game industry is going to yield mistaken calculations hypothesizing how many discs a given game would/should take up. My emphasizing the fact that the dual-sided discs are not used in video game distribution the facts can remain but the practical useful information is highlighted within context of the discussion.

You still have to be grateful that compression exists, otherwise well... as an example Carmack said that the original full resolution uncompressed textures for RAGE would amount to Terabytes of data (just textures mind you). Although this title being a special case since the particular texture tech used, still give a decent insight.

They cut, and cut, and cut, and then cut some more to something among the lines of 100~120 GB that then was compressed to the final game size of 20~40 GB of the console/PC.

So yeah, it's huge but it's the way it is.

Data compression... ahh one of my favorite topics. Raw audio would be (for CD quality) 10MB a minute, an hour of DVD quality video would be 69Gigs of data, a single second of video for HD (30fps) would be 118Mb.

Early and easy compression often with minimal work can get you a 2:1 reduction, especially with text and content with a lot of duplication. Far more complex and better pattern matching can get much better results, although some data just can't get compressed.

in the 60's Huffman came up with how to do a variable rate compression using a tree unlike his professor who had a similar scheme but wasn't as optimized. Huffman, RLE, differential, pattern matching, sorting... all good fun and good times...

Well, since apparently I'm being pedantic today, Fallout4 comes on DVD-9. It's the only game disc I have at hand and I'm too lazy to go rifle through my collection, but I'm almost certain that quite a few games released in the last few years are on DVD-9.

Good to see that it's being used. I figured there would be some, just never observed it myself that I recall, but then I stopped buying games on DVD in 2007 too. I imagine it would be ultra painful to install a 25GB+ game from DVD these days on 4.3GB discs. How many discs is Fallout 4 anyway? I've no idea how big that game is but I presume that it must be up there a bit.

Does anyone own The Witcher 3 on DVD, and if so how many discs was it? Must be a nightmare to install such games from disc either way though. :) I remember installing games from 4-8 CDROMs and what a huge PITA that was hehehe.

It's 5.6 gigs on a single disk with the rest downloaded through Steam. If I hadn't - in a moment of weakness - preordered the collectors edition (yes, with that atrocious-looking wrist doohickey) and then forgotten about it until Amazon told me it was shipping, I wouldn't have a disc. There admittedly really isn't a whole lot of reason to have them anymore.

My Fallout4 install directory is 25.3 GB according to Windows File Explorer.

The box says 'Game discs 1-3' So I'm going to say 3.

That is insane.

When the original IBM PC came out, a 10 megabyte HD was considered as huge, and nobody could imagine then how to get so much data on it to be full. :-D
Or was it a 20 Megabyte HD?

Ah, I bet they used dual-layer then as a mild form of copy discouragement perhaps. Dual layer burners are easily available and probably most of them support it nowadays, but for years many did not, so people wanting to rip dual-layer DVD movies etc. would not be able to burn them unless they used software like DVDshrink or similar back in the day. No way to do that with software easily. Mind you the game wouldn't likely work without the rest of the content from Steam anyway so perhaps I'm being overzealous on this aspect. :)

Yeah, I pretty much swore off DVD-anything after season 12 of South Park, and my true indoctrination into the GOG, which was Oct 2012 despite my account being made in 2009. GOG got me to drink the digital distribution koolaid and reverse my previous penchant for holding a physical box/disc/manual (and eventually tripping over the mountains of that crap throughout the house). :)

Do you just have the base game for FO4, or any DLC etc. also? I'm probably going to hold off on buying it for a few years as I'd like to wait for a GPU upgrade, plus a price drop and potentially even a GOG release sometime down the line. Also, I haven't played FO3 or FONV yet and even though they're all unrelated story lines IIUC, I'd like to play them in tech-order. :) I did watch a buddy play it for a while over Steam broadcasting though and it looked pretty wicked.
I think they were 5/10/20. I used to have an ST506 with one of those old clunkers but I'm pretty sure I tossed all that old crap years ago. Every now and then it's a good idea to pollute a landfill site with all the old useless crap PC hardware. :oP

Just the base game. At the last moment I decided against the season pass and it seems that was the correct choice. The DLCs are anemic. The game itself is simply average. It is not quite as good as FO3, by my estimate, and not nearly as good as New Vegas. The base building is a very interesting concept but it is executed poorly. Preston Garvey can take his "another settlement needs your help!" and stuff it up his mirelurk. The NPCs are - with I think 2 exceptions (Nick and CVRIE) - more hassle than they're worth. The story isn't terribly memorable, and near the end loses even that much quality. It also doesn't seem to be terribly well optimized (or something), since I can play Witcher 3 at 4k with everything on except HairWorks and have a smooth framerate throughout, but my Titan X can't reliably crank out 20fps at 4k in FO4, and FO4 does *not* look as good as Witcher 3.

All that said, it's not a bad game by any measure. I played through it twice and had fun with it. It just seems like maybe it was slightly too audacious and instead of being awesome at all the things it did, it was awesome at two or three and just shrugged and accepted "good enough" for the rest. Like all Elder Scrolls games (Yeah, I know. I called Fallout3 TES4.5 and FO4 TES 5.5) though, it will almost certainly keep getting better as mod support fleshes out and all the patches are completed. It's probably worth playing, but I certainly do recommend Fallout New Vegas. I think it's the best of the modern 3, and the complaints about bugs should be ignored since they are very well patched at this point.

I'm going to say that's incorrect. Even with 10-20Mb space was slim, so they had space saving rules in place, for document formats, for the filesystem, for programs, etc. Truthfully it's incredibly easy to fill a drive so small up, especially when likely the first drives had to be part of a mainframe where a thousand users or more were using it. Likely they had small sector sizes probably of 128 bytes (which I'm aware a lot of 8bit computers did)

As for when they moved from punch cards (for the program/code) to actually having software written on the harddrive, that I'm not so sure.

Don't forget there wasn't much ram, you probably had 4k of ram at the time during those days too, so there wasn't room for compression/decompression to save space on the fly.


As for IBM PC's with the classic 64k ram.. Well, on the fly compression wasn't included then either. I've heard that for compiling programs C had to do separate processes as separate programs. For actual work, 20Mb just isn't enough room for a lot of things.