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.
ROMS of retro games.
Bro forgot to bring an emulator… Enjoy staring at binary code or something.
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!
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.
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!
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.
