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Comment by makomk | Hacker News Reader

More like the complete version happens to be 50 GB larger than the shipped on-disc data, judging from the 96 GB install size. The maximum size of a Blu-Ray is about 50 GB, so we're hitting the point where games are too big to even fit on a single disc and it's almost just acting as a dongle for the download version.

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On XBox and PC, the free space requirement is 60gB; on PC the game folder winds up at 49gB.

The PS4 needs 96gB free because its digital installers work by downloading everything, then copying things to where they need to go, and then deleting the download. At 99.99% installed, there are two copies of the game on disk, and if there's not enough space for that, the install fails.

red dead redemption 2 recently released and required two discs. one was data only, whcih was copied off. the other disc was data plus the playable disc. this is the first ps4 game i have seen do that, but i don't know if there are others.

Oh man this brings me back to 5 CD jrpgs.

We had to know it was inevitable.

Don't get us old guys started on the number of floppies...

Lemon lists 11 games for the Amiga that had more than 10 floppy disks. I owned 4 of them (Indy 4, Monkey Island 2, Flight of the Amazon Queen, and Beneath a Steel Sky).

Luckily I had a hard disk. I don't even remember that BaSS had 15 disks! That must have taken a whole evening to install that thing. But it took only 12 MB on the hard disk although that was 10% of the whole disk capacity. Times sure have changed.

http://www.lemonamiga.com/games/list.php?list_disks_option=m...

Beneath A Steel Sky was Amazing.

Time to dust off the Amiga emulator :-)

The PC/Mac/Linux version with full audio is available for free: https://www.gog.com/game/beneath_a_steel_sky

Might as well mention that it can be downloaded for free here, including a bunch of other games that run on SCUMMVM:

https://www.scummvm.org/games/

Oh god yes. Back before hard disks (Amiga A500+ in my case), trying to play an N-floppy game on a 1-floppy system was... character-building.

I remember Microsoft Space Simulator had something like 11 discs to install.

Yeah, but (presumably) at least you only had to install it once.

Still remember Windows 95 with 21 floppies.

In 2002 I decided to install Windows 95 on a black & white Win3.1-based laptop, just for the heck of it. It had a one or two hundred megabyte hard drive, but only a floppy drive for I/O, so it felt like metaphorically building a ship in a bottle. Unfortunately by the 2000s the quality of floppy disks was atrocious. I had to go through three boxes (about 75 disks) to come up with a set of 21 Windows 95 install disks that had no write or read errors.

Later I realized I could have done the job, and faster, using just two disks: one in the computer writing the disk images and one in laptop reading the disk (and then swap disks & overwrite with the next image). D'oh!

oh man, the dreaded "click click, click click,...".

You think that's bad? Try Office 97 on 46 floppies:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5o6NQmEA-8

(Yes, this was a real, official thing that was available from Microsoft)

The difference between Win 3.1 and Win 95 was really life changing. The usability of Win 95 certainly sped up adoption of the Web by non-university/govt users.

Early Linux distros downloaded via 14.4kbps modem for me. I... don’t even remember how many floppies that took. Lots as I recall.

My first Linux distro was SLS, sporting Linux kernel version 0.99pl12, and it came on 15 5.25in floppies. I only had Usenet at the time, so I wasn't able to download it directly, and had to pay some random person to mail me the floppies.

I was then setting up my own little TCP/IP network with a NFS server on my two machines, connected via coax Ethernet using NE2000 network cards.

Thank goodness for CD-ROMs. Only a few years after that, I was able to just go into a computer store and just buy a single CD with Yggdrasil (or RH or Slackware) which made the whole process much easier. As long as your system could boot off of CD-ROM... sometimes you still needed to make a boot disk.

I had a friend that only used two floppies... one installing on a new computer, the other downloading the next disk... (isdn line) It actually worked out pretty well.

My first modem was 2.4kbps. Thankfully google didn't exist back then

I installed this a few times! :D

I still remember the 4 floppies of monkey island AND the inside joke when you find a stomp and the game starts to ask for the disk #22!

I remember autocad 12 + extensions on floppies... loading for a lab. Man that was the series of installs that just wouldn't end. IIRC win9x on floppy was almost as bad.

Win95 + Office, at least 50 floppies, and no FEC (forward error correction), so any one got damaged, and that's it.

I think Wing Commander IV was the most discs of any game I owned (6 IIRC).

Either Wing Commander II or Gabriel Knight was the most floppies (both around 12).

One of my first games was Baldur's Gate 2. That was 6 cdroms iirc.

Oh well look on the bright side: its better than no patches. Bethesda has a history of ignoring bugs. They let Skyrim on PS3 wither on the vine.

If I remember correctly original Phantasmagoria release that I still have had like 7 discs.

5 CDs, with live switching as you progressed in game. Still like that one although I'd not revisit it.

Item on Ebay that look identical to the box I have tell it's 7 CD, but it's possible that game itself only took 5 and other 2 are some bonus content.

Probably will check it myself in a week once I visit my father.

Or I'm remembering poorly after ten years, most likely

Takes me back to Riven

I used to have an original edition The Sims 2. 5 discs to install as well. What a long way we've come.

Or the Gamecube version of Resident Evil 4.

Yeah iirc Call of Duty 2 had 5 discs on PC

Unreal Tournament 2004 was like 7 CDs. I remember having to buy a second hard drive for that game. Worth it.

Redbox sent me an email that had a picture of RDR2 "Disc 1" in the list of new games. I wasn't sure what that meant, and figured that data disc might have had a gimped version of the game with only one or two chapters.

Turns out, you have to rent both discs to play! One to install (which took like two hours for me, if not more), and one to play. I guess you only need to rent one disc after that, but they're still getting at least $6 out of anybody that wants to play.

I think GTA5 had something like this.

The GTA5 box holds 7 dual-layer DVDs: https://www.reddit.com/r/GrandTheftAutoV_PC/comments/31vdpb/...

(edit: for the PC version, that is; and even that might depend on the year you got the thing. Also found a Reddit thread with the box on display)

the ps4 version, which is a blu-ray, only has one disc.

> More like the complete version happens to be 50 GB larger than the shipped on-disc data, judging from the 96 GB install size

Compressed distributions that are expanded for install have been used at least since floppies were the main distribution media for isn't all to fixed disks.

Distribution media (and the fixed disks they install to) may be on the order of 5 orders of magnitude larger now, but that hasn't changed.

I don't think that's as true as it once was - the majority of that 96GB is almost certainly media of some kind - images, textures, music, etc. - they don't losslessly compress well at all.

I thought disk I/O was a major blocker for loading in games, which would imply you'd want to keep things compressed on disk.

Additionally, as another commenter pointed out, the majority of assets are in formats that support native compression (textures and audio) and thus won't compress too well a 2nd time.

BD-XL will hit 128GB, but its unclear to me if those can be pressed, or are only writable disks.

https://www.anandtech.com/show/13575/sony-releases-128-gb-bd...

The Wikipedia article seems to imply that BDXL (if the hardware even supports it) uses additional layers to reach 100GB(base10) for a quad layer disc.

There is archival optical disc, which is reader-compatible with BluRay and stores up to 1TB. Written by a 220-405nm laser like original BD-R.

I can't find info about it being "reader-compatible". According to a brief note in wikipedia, it has a different metadata format from blu-ray, so would it at least need different firmware in the drive?

You can ignore ATIP if you just read it.

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