3mo ago

If you could only have 1GB of entertainment data, what would it be?

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.

121 comments

ROMS of retro games.
- Bro forgot to bring an emulator... Enjoy staring at binary code or something.
  
  wouldnt be an issue if you have the hardware to run said roms.
  
  The real fun is doing software emulation running inside your mental calculations.
  
  You get used to it, I don't even see the code. All I see is Red Plumber. Coin. Mushroom. Pipe.

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.
- Even 7zip can compress a large text file to less than 25% of it's original size. The installer is less than 2MB. There are even better compression algorithms for text than 7zip though.
- Text of an average book is 100,000 letters;
  I'm not sure where you're getting that value. The low end of word count for a novel is 50,000. If we say the average word is only 5 characters, we're looking at a quarter million letters and another 50,000 spaces for a short novel (200-250 pages). Throw in some more for punctuation and formatting, of course. If you're a fan of big epic fantasy/sci-fi you're probably closer to a million words.

Books!
- If you ignore the covers, 1GB could have 1000's of books.
  
  My ebpubs are 2,700 files at 1.5GB. And that's with all the extra crap like JPGs and tons of dupes. I could read forever on 1GB.
  
  Exactly
  
  But then how would we judge them?

When you take file sizes into account, EBooks are the most high-density entertainment you can bring. Followed by old-school games, then music, then video.
- I would probably choose my favourite movie in SD, a few dozen of my favourite songs, a few dozen old school games, and then fill out the rest with a few hundred ebooks.
  Variety can be way more valuable than pure quantity.

I guess raw text files of books would be the best bang for your buck.
- Compress those suckers!
- Something like Project Gutenberg would fit well here. You'd never run out of books for the rest of your life.

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
- 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 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!

Books, lots and lots of books.
- Your comment made me think of that scene from The Matrix. Idk if that was intentional or not, but I liked it enough to ask an AI to make the image above.

Books have the highest density of information per GB... So Books is...
- status of "Books"
  ~~isnt~~ is

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.

One of those compressed Wikipedia dumps, and a whole bunch of retro games. And several MB of text-only ebooks. Compressed of course.
- English Wikipedia is about 22gb without media.
  
  That’s compressed, and plain text compress very well.
  For my master’s final project I downloaded the English Wikipedia and after unzipping it grew quite large. I don’t remember the total size, also it was 2018, it will be larger now.

The entire NES amd GB catalog and 200mb of N64 titles
- You just skipped the entire SNES catalog for some N64 titles?

As many digital books as possible and an emulator with as many old school games as possible assuming I have access to a way to play them.

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.

This is 4kb.
Just saying.
- kkrieger is 128kb, try it... still mind blowing and from the times of Doom3!!!!
- No .. that's 4k not 4kb
  
  Seems you didn't read the description. The executable that produced that output was 4 kilobytes in size.
  
  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.
  
  No it is 4kb.
  Thanks for incorrecting me.

Ebooks.
It's still probably not close to enough for my ebooks, but at least it makes a dent. Even terrible quality video adds up fast.

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

How much drugs is equal to 1Gb?
- About .67 ghb
  
  Take your fuckin upvote and go hahah
  
  That’s enough to get fucked up about three times.
  Proper fucked up.
- Yes

Porn
50/50 chance amirite

A guide to learning a programming language and a compiler for said programming language. Maybe Godot.
- What are you going to do with the other 900mb?
  
  Make a video game

A super hi-fidelity version of Darude’s « Sandstorm »

well; if I start with this: https://www.hvsc.c64.org/downloads Which is 58K songs in 80MB (which is enough to last several lifetimes)
Or I could get a mod tracker and some files from ftp://ftp.modland.com/pub/playlists/ and I would have the ability in a few 100 MB to make the type of music I enjoy (It would take 150GB to get every sample of every sound used in the entire world)
Hit up https://www.pouet.net/prodlist.php if you want a bunch of awesome demos ranging from 32 bytes all the way up to 32KB per
unxz.c is 60KB of code and everything you need to build it from source (with literally nothing but hex) only takes up 1.4MB of space https://github.com/oriansj/stage0-posix/
and with unxz, untar and ungz basically Text compresses extremely well and you'll have a hundred lifetimes of books thanks to https://gutenberg.org/
But movies like S1m0ne (2002), Sneakers (1992) and Colossus - The Forbin Project (1970) could also fit too.

A few assumptions:
There will be some sort of PC available, with a keyboard and mouse and speakers, and basic programs to play audio/video, read text/PDF documents, etc. that don't count toward my 1GB limit
I will have knowledge ahead of time about this PC and its specs, OS, installed programs, etc.
First, I'd make sure to include a stripped down version of 7zip, or whatever compression I use (y'all don't wanna get on there and realize you can't decompress your files). Hopefully only a few MB for a CLI utility.
Second, I'd include a decent library stored in a compressed text format. Some fiction, some non-fiction, classics, some of my favorite series, a bunch of "Intro to ___" type of books, that kind of thing. Probably up to 50MB or so.
Third, I would include some low-quality audio of some favorite music as well as a few audio books. Maybe 200MB or so.
Fourth, I'd include a copy of a simple game engine system (maybe something like libgdx) as well as Inkscape, and whatever compiler I would need to create programs/games for my PC, and relevant documentation. This would give me both a creative outlet, and allow me and my companion to make new games for each other to have something novel. Hopefully around 100 or 200MB.
Depending on the size, I might also consider including something like FruityLoops, again to be able to create new content. Ideally something that's 100MB or so.
With whatever space I have left (300 or 400MB-ish), I'd include things like emulators and a couple favorite older games (Lord of the Realms 2 comes to mind) that have good replay value and would be small enough to fit. Ideally some multi-player options as well (assuming a shared keyboard).
Without previous knowledge of the available PC, I'd include multiple builds of 7zip for most common architectures, and prioritize the books and audio. Maybe bring a couple variants of GCC and minGW (if I can write programs, I can eventually replicate lots of the other software).

1/500,000th of my porn collection.
- Which parts though?
  
  Just the shots of balls swinging

How do I compress 650 GB of flac files to fit in 1 GB?
- Easy, just compress all your collection into 24kbps mp3.
  
  I genuinely did concert a bunch of my stuff to 32kbps MP3 when I had a shitty like, 64MB MP3 player. It sounded horrible but I could have more songs.
  Then I got a job and literally the moment I had saved enough I bought an iPod. That’s when I learned about how much sales tax can scale on larger purchases. And also how overdraft fees work. Very valuable lessons for a high school student.
  
  I mean it might work. But I will never go back to mp3. Besides mp3 is pretty much obsolete when ogg opus creates smaller files with not as much audible compression. I need my flac.

50% books maximum compression 25% music 128kb or maybe 96kb 25% video, cartoons compress the best, very low quality audio, very low resolution, very low framerate. Probably my favorite episodes from Futurama, Bluey.
I'd rather have loads of shitty quality content than a few choice pristine copies of high quality stuff.
I might also consider reducing each of those by half and including One of the smaller 250-500mb LLM and have it draft out ideas for stories and sit around writing code to make it generate content.

An emulator and a shitton of old roms. The further back you go, the smaller they get. I'll probably splurge on a few choice games over 100mb with good pvp or co-op to play with my partner, but the vast majority will be under 5mb.
- Every Atari 2600 game ever made is like 2MB compressed :)
- My old Pii-200 dos box has literally humdreds of games on a 1gb hdd

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.
- I would totally love a Rendezvous with Rama-like game. Explore a massive world inside the cylinder.

A compressed version of the Shrek movie.
Make it 480p at 18 frames instead of 24, then compress the audio as much as needed, I already know most of the lines.
There is no god, only Shrek.
It's all Ogre now.
- I doubt you'd have to get even that crazy. Bet you could get it under 700 at 720 and 2 Ch audio. That gives you 300 for porn.
- I've gotten the shrek movie to fit in under 25 MiB. You probably can easily fit the whole 4 movies and leave some space for books if you know how to compress video well.

Lots of epub files!

418 copies of DOOM
- Monkey's Paw: but it's the shareware version and only has the first episode.
  
  Sure, but he still has 418 fresh copies to play through.

Maybe just Valheim. Boy are we going to feel silly if we brought two copies!

500,000 pages of ASCII-encoded books.
- Only 128 characters? You’re gonna have issues converting everything to ASCII when you can’t even write “café”.
  
  So? I'll take some characters that aren't 100% correct, if I can read 4x as many books that way.

I'd take a gander at my digital copies of several D&D books. Maybe chop all the art/pics and just have text. If nothing else just the core books and a dice app if I couldn't bring physical ones.
- What would you do with the D&D books? I am unfortunately not very familiar with D&D. Is it to play with the other person, or something to do on your own? Are there types of games like that are better for two people?
  I have seen similar things mentioned a few times.
  
  Technically, it can be played by one person. Two would be the more ideal bare minimum.
  And ya you'd use them to play the game. With a game like this, or any other TTRPG you essentially have near infinite entertainment.

A zip file full of text files containing a ton of knowledge necessary to complete the journey, and a bunch of books. Maybe an emulator and a few nes games.

GZDoom + supporting .WAD files: ~130MB installed.
Ultimate Doom Builder: ~35MB installed.
Foobar2000 + .mod file support: ~13MB installed.
OpenMPT: ~21MB installed.
Okular: 230MB installed.
Fill the rest up with community maps/mods, tracker files and ebooks.
- flabbergasted that this was more or less how i was going respond to the question

Animal Well is 30mb. That's my start.

That’s only about 5% of the text of Wikipedia. Maybe I’ll take just the top 100k articles.

Welp...Slay the Spire is apparently 1gb installed, so it'll probably be that

1 GB of books
- I'm going to assume the other person has that covered.
  I'm filling mine with 4k baby shark music videos.

As many episodes of Futurama I can fit in.

Would use 1/2 on ebooks, 1/2 on passible quality music I'd give up some quality for size reduction. I'd probably save a little space for a sudoku game.
- 20 years ago, I used to have custom playlists that I'd load onto a 64mb SD card for my commute. A 64kbit wma file is surprisingly listenable. You can fit more than a standard album onto 64mb. I'm trying to remember now how much, probably 20-25 songs?
  At that compression rate, I expect you can get a few hundred songs into half a GB. Of course, picking them would be its own challenge! It'd be the most curated playlist in history.
- I'm going to willingly misread this as you wanting AI "compressed" ebooks lol
  
  I have read somewhere that some text can be compressed incredibly efficiently in some AI models. The issue being that the compressed data is worthless without the model and power to recover it.

128k mp3s
- That would be around 250 songs.

flcl in 240p. the shittiest version to fit size constraints of john frusciante's The Empyrean & glassjaw's my color green and coloring book

About 250mb worth of pics of the fam, in low res, a copy of Predator in 240p which I guess would be another 250mb, low quality music for another 250mb, and 250mb of a nes emulator and nes roms. Once all out together i wouldplay around with all of this and fit in some Star Trek, Andromeda, and Toast of London episodes.

I would have 1 Call of Duty asset.

Halo CE should be around 600mb.

Music, music, and more music. I would say books but I read too fast, they wouldn't last. Might as well just remember the stories I have already read. Well, actually - my favorite books please yes.
- I think text is going to be the most dense, information wise. With plain text you could fit about 2500 average length books in 1gb, that's not considering any compression.
  Additionally, you could create a novel representation of words to reduce the total amount of text and include a key to expand it back out, replacing common groupings of letters like 'ch' with 'k' for example
  If you could get a 2:1 compression ratio from your modified alphabet and a 4:1 compression ratio from traditional compression algorithms you could get up to 20 thousand books! That's a book a day for 55 years,
  I think music is gonna take up way too much space. Compressed all the way down to 32kbps which is going to be a pretty miserable listening experience (everything will sound underwater) you are only going to get ~75 ish hours of music.
  Cut that in half for a more tolerable 64kbps.
  It's a decent amount of music, but not a lifetime's worth of your only entertainment imo.
  Edit: for some context on audio, 320kbps mp3 will only net you 7 hours of music.
  
  Hmm, well what else can we bring? Guitar and strings? How much of the day is busy with work, and how much left for recreation? If we aren't going to be busy then yeah I would love to read. But it takes my whole attention. Music can play and work, so if our time is mostly spent working and sleeping, it would help a lot.

Use 150mb to put a low quality version of Firefly that I used to have on a Nokia phone around 2007/2008, and the rest will be my collection of ebooks.
I've got more than 1gb of books, but I can trim down the file size by stripping formatting and saving as plain text, and there's a few series I could go without reading for a long time.

MIDIs of my favourite melodies, some actual music, probably just my favourites from my playlists over the years, ASCII encoded books and ROMs of old games with an emulator

OK, it seems I can bring my current music library. I experimented with it a bit now, and I guess I could get used to 12kbps Opus or 12.65kbps AMR-WB (they sound comparable). It kinda sounds like off-tuned FM radio, not the much more awful artifacts of MP3 or AAC.
Although... can I bring a cassette tape player? It's analog, so tapes won't fall under this limit. Then I could possibly digitize it. Similarly with movies on film. I don't know what equipment I can take though. Movies on film, photos on paper, books on paper, music on tapes, hmmm... I guess that would be some games then. What counts under the media though? Just the games themselves, emulation software, entire OS?

Valhiem is just 1gb. Just saying...

121 comments