Longest living console?


My Commodore 64 got broken, uh, about 14 years ago. My nephew's C64 still works fine though. Today, one SD card is worth a million C64 floppies, and a Pandora has at least 2000 times the cpu power of a C64, and 4000 times as much RAM (or 8000 for the German ones). Imagine two thousand Commodore 64s and a million floppies, fitting in your pocket.
 
_wb_ said:
Today, one SD card is worth a million C64 floppies
Click to expand...

I did some quick math based on a figure of 170KB storage capacity for those floppy disks (which is what Wikipedia said) and I got 170 GB. OK, so in a sense you're spot-on, because there's SDXC cards with similar capacities (128 GB). But 128 GB cards are almost $200 right now (or, at least, that's what Amazon is selling them for), and the Pandora only officially supports two SDHC cards, which can only go up to 32 GB officially for a maximum of 64 GB. With that in mind, a million floppies is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? ;)
 
Well my analytical engine still works just as well as the day that I created it in 1835, unlike a certain other persons. *cough* Babbage *cough*
 
onpon4 said:
_wb_ said:
Today, one SD card is worth a million C64 floppies
Click to expand...

I did some quick math based on a figure of 170KB storage capacity for those floppy disks (which is what Wikipedia said) and I got 170 GB. OK, so in a sense you're spot-on, because there's SDXC cards with similar capacities (128 GB). But 128 GB cards are almost $200 right now (or, at least, that's what Amazon is selling them for), and the Pandora only officially supports two SDHC cards, which can only go up to 32 GB officially for a maximum of 64 GB. With that in mind, a million floppies is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? ;)
Click to expand...
Now do the same with tapes! :D (Tapes were the dominant media for games, here, at that time, and this extended to the Commodore 64, as well.)
 
I pulled my old amiga 500 out of the wardrobe after about 7 years.She's still working fine except for a dirty diskdrive which i bought a floppy cleaning disc to fix.She's 22 years old now and honestly it's the one item that i could never sell not for a thousand euros.I had to buy a new rca cable and I also purchased an old music creation program called deluxe music construction set.
 
Prometheus said:
onpon4 said:
I did some quick math based on a figure of 170KB storage capacity for those floppy disks (which is what Wikipedia said) and I got 170 GB. OK, so in a sense you're spot-on, because there's SDXC cards with similar capacities (128 GB). But 128 GB cards are almost $200 right now (or, at least, that's what Amazon is selling them for), and the Pandora only officially supports two SDHC cards, which can only go up to 32 GB officially for a maximum of 64 GB. With that in mind, a million floppies is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? ;)
Click to expand...
Now do the same with tapes! :D (Tapes were the dominant media for games, here, at that time, and this extended to the Commodore 64, as well.)
Click to expand...

Alright. I didn't mention: if you assume a 32 GB SD card as your threshold, that makes an SD card able to hold about 200,000 C64 floppies.


Now, tapes... Wikipedia tells me that they could typically store 100 KB per "30 minute side". I take that to mean double-sided tapes were common, so depending on what you're going by, that makes a 32 GB card the same as either 320,000 (one-sided) or 160,000 (two-sided) tapes.


However, Wikipedia also mentions "turbo tape" being able to increase the 100 KB limit to about 1000 KB (i.e. 1 MB). I don't know how common this was, but if this is your threshold, that makes a 32 GB card worth only 32,000 or 16,000 tapes.


By the way, a million 100 KB tapes is 100 GB or 200 GB, and a million 1000 KB tapes is 1000 GB (1 TB) or 2000 GB (2 TB).


So depending on the size of the tapes and whether or not they're double-sided, you can either store many more, a bit less, or nowhere near as much as the number of floppies you can store.


Of course, it's worth mentioning that double sided floppies were also possible. Again, I don't know how common they were. But that would make a 32 GB SD card only able to hold about 100,000 floppies (and make a million floppies able to store 340 GB).
 
My gameboy survived regular trips in the washing machine, droppings down the stairs and buried halfway to hell in muddy ground from my childhood...


The battery cover is missing, the screen cover is gone and the power switch regularly gets stuck but you know what?


it still works.
 
onpon4 said:
_wb_ said:
Today, one SD card is worth a million C64 floppies
Click to expand...

I did some quick math based on a figure of 170KB storage capacity for those floppy disks (which is what Wikipedia said) and I got 170 GB. OK, so in a sense you're spot-on, because there's SDXC cards with similar capacities (128 GB). But 128 GB cards are almost $200 right now (or, at least, that's what Amazon is selling them for), and the Pandora only officially supports two SDHC cards, which can only go up to 32 GB officially for a maximum of 64 GB. With that in mind, a million floppies is a bit of a stretch, don't you think? ;)
Click to expand...

Actually the floppies have two sides, so you could fit twice as much. Then again, the Pandora also has 2 SD slots. Sure, big SD cards are expensive, but not as expensive as one million floppies ;) ... I don't remember how expensive they were back then, now they cost about 1 dollar per floppy (if you can still find them), so even if you take a huge quantity discount into account, so you can bring it down to 10 cents per floppy, it would still be $100,000. Plus the cost of the containers to put them in - I don't know exactly how much the weight is of one floppy, but it's probably more than 10 grams, so a million floppies would be more than 10 metric tons, you cannot just put them on a big pile because they would get crushed under their own weight, so some kind of containers would be absolutely necessary, adding to the cost.


I guess at some point in the not-so-far-away future there will be 256 GB and 512 GB SD cards, and some of them will probably work with the Pandora, probably not at higher speeds than 16 MB / sec but still... (not bad if you compare with C64, which would get maybe 4 KB / sec)


So no, I don't think my original post was exaggerating at all :)


Of course, there is no way you would need that many floppies, since all C64 stuff that has ever existed probably fits on "only" 10,000 or so floppies, which would easily fit on a 4GB SD card. For example, I found an archive somewhere on the internet that essentially contains all C64 games (it has about 17,000 titles so I guess it is quite complete, many are small tape games and every floppy side has its own title so this is much less than 10,000 floppies), and the complete archive fits in a .zip file of about 524 MB.
 
If you want to compare with tapes: assuming Turbo Tape, you could fit 1 MB on each side. So one 128 GB SD card would be about 65,000 tapes. However, assuming a read speed of 10 MB / sec on the SD card (and you can easily get higher speeds) and 1 KB / sec on the tape (this would be very fast on a Commodore 64, something like 300 bytes per second would already be quite good), it would take about 3.5 hours to read all data from the SD card, while it would take a bit more than 4 years with the tape reader, assuming no time to flip and replace tapes. And that is for sequential reading, imagine the horror of doing random access reads! :)
 
Well let's see here I have quite literally 5 or 6 original gameboys My dads NES ( not a console but I still have his red rider bb gun you'll shoot your eye out kid :) ) Atari 2600 oddsy 2 with box in decentish condition a good system although over looked virtual boy also overlooked yet epic, SMS , Snes n64 gameboy color neo geo pocket color coulpa game and watches ( love those things very dearly ) and 2 gamegears
 
Yes I am aware that my last post had nothing to do with the number of floppies on can fit on a 4 gig sd
 
Its not the same one as i owned in the past, but i got a snes recently, and pre ordered a sd2snes from ED, it should be available i na few weeks.


This will allow me to fit multiple games in one card, gonna have some cool retro evenings with that.


I also own an MSX2+, but its memory is broken, it can only load 45KB of memory blocks, the rest is busted, need to get the memory replaced.
 
Last edited by a moderator:
Recently I got a sega 32x , Know any decent games ?


Thanks in advance ,


2bit .
 
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