LÖVE

Hi Guys,

I'm wanting to put my LOVE project a 1.44MB floppy disk for a marketing project. It's not very large by itself, the exe is only around 500KB, but with the DLLs needed for the windows executable, it's at 5MB uncompressed and about 2MB compressed

Can make it smaller somehow? perhaps by cutting some functionality out of the library itself? I've not used any of the physics part of the library.

I appreciate this might be pretty tough but I would be greatful any help or insight. Thanks.

The only way I can think of is making the diskette contain a "fake" program that downloads the real one from internet.

try UPX. It reduces size some 30-40% in my test. Probably not enough, but it is a start.

If you have any images, you can reduce its quality, too, or compress it - the latter goes outside what I know about or have ever done, though..

(is it even possible? how?)

You could hack away at the C++ source code and remove everything you don't need until it fits :)

josefnpat wrote:You could hack away at the C++ source code and remove everything you don't need until it fits

You could try to use compiler options for size reduction, with, which combined with an binary compressor may get it down to 1.44mb without removing any code.


though, obviously, this is all far more work than simply buying a USB flash drive.

It's a cool marketing project, but I don't think you have to actually put the game on the floppy disk... nobody will be able to run it anyway.

I haven't seen any pcs delivered with floppy drives for the past 10 years, and I wonder if your game would even run on something old enough to still have the drive...

(Unless computer composition is completely different where you are from, in which case, ignore this )

You could also just separate it and put it on several floppys. Some games back in the day did this. I think the RAR format supports separating the archive into multiple subarchives that can be decompressed when they're all together again.

Floppy drive? Is a floppy disk a requirement? (If so, then why in god's name?) Or do they literally have old PC's from 20 years ago? Because any PC from 1999 or higher is going to at least have a USB drive in which case why not use a USB stick? It has to be recent if it is able to run Löve. Because any computer that has a floppy but not USB is going to be way too old to run Löve. So therefore we have to assume it has USB in which case, why a floppy? Is this a class project? Or a work project? If it's a class project, why would they torture you like that?

If it's a requirement, why? It's a dead technology. They might as well ask you to put it on a 5MB SCSI drive or one of those hilariously oversized floppy disks from WarGames. (Not 5.25". Bigger than 5.25".)

If it has to be a floppy, as T-Bone says above, can you use multiples? Does it have to run from the disk? Because if you can use multiples, split it across two or more disks and copy to the HDD. (At a super slow rate. Oh yes, I remember the horrible days of using floppy disks. I hated them even in the '90s and refused to use them which resulted in losing projects all the time in a time when there was no cloud storage and 1MB files took hours to upload and download)

Jasoco wrote:Oh yes, I remember the horrible days of using floppy disks. I hated them even in the '90s (...)

Ugh, me too. I used to transfer a lot of files all the time, but didn't have an internet connection myself yet. So I ended up saving the same projects to 3 or 4 disks, just because I knew in transit at least 2 of them would become corrupted. I threw a lot of them at the wall as hard as I could after finding out they lost all their contents again.