Playing Factorio on a Floppy Disk Cluster

An Innovative Project in the Digital Age

While floppy disks once served as a revolutionary storage system, they have become largely obsolete in today's world. High failure rates and slow speeds present major challenges. However, for this project by [DocJade], the main difficulty lies in capacity. The goal is to play the video game Factorio using floppy disks.

Storing several gigabytes of data on floppy disks poses a considerable challenge. Instead of utilizing a RAID setup, a single reader and a custom file system are employed. One floppy disk is dedicated to storing grouping information, allowing for caching of file locations to reduce disk swaps.

The file system can store large files across multiple floppy disks, all mounted using FUSE and largely compatible with POSIX, although certain features like permissions and links are absent.

With data stored across thousands of floppy disks, users are prompted to insert a new disk as needed. This limitation affects read and write speeds more than the known speeds of the disks themselves. In fact, it takes about a week to load all of Factorio in this manner, even after optimizations aimed at reducing disk swapping. Factorio is one of the few games that can be installed this way, as it loads most of the game into memory at launch.

Not a fan of Factorio? No problem, you can always install a modern Linux distribution on a floppy disk!