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.

  • NutWrench@lemmy.ml
    38·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • Pyr_Pressure@lemmy.ca
      12·
      2 months ago

      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 Cast Fist@programming.dev
    30·
    2 months ago

    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

    • zod000@lemmy.ml
      4·
      2 months ago

      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 Cast Fist@programming.dev
        3·
        2 months ago

        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!

        • zod000@lemmy.ml
          2·
          2 months ago

          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.

  • Quik@infosec.pub
    30·
    2 months ago

    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.

    • boatswain@infosec.pub
      51·
      2 months ago

      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.

    • AwkwardLookMonkeyPuppet@lemmy.worldEnglish
      11·
      2 months ago

      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.

  • zod000@lemmy.ml
    23·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • VelvetStorm@lemmy.world
    22·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • ripcord@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 months ago

    One of those compressed Wikipedia dumps, and a whole bunch of retro games. And several MB of text-only ebooks. Compressed of course.

  • Cowbee [he/him]@lemmy.ml
    17·
    2 months ago

    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.

  • owenfromcanada@lemmy.worldEnglish
    151·
    2 months ago

    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).