Difference between revisions of "Pack of floppies"
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==Artifacts== | ==Artifacts== | ||
| − | '''The | + | '''The Master Boot Disk''' is the quest artifact for the [[Geek]] role in [[SlashTHEM]], a neutral-aligned pack of floppies that grants [[reflection]] while carried and can be invoked for [[phasing]]. |
| − | '''The | + | '''The Nethack Sources''' is the [[Hacker]] quest artifact, a neutral-aligned pack of floppies that grants [[searching]], [[ESP]], and [[regeneration]] while carried. It can be [[invoke]]d to [[identify]] items, presumably by very fast [[source diving]]. |
*artilist.h 459, 465 | *artilist.h 459, 465 | ||
Revision as of 12:05, 27 September 2023
| ( | |
|---|---|
| Name | pack of floppies |
| Appearance | box containing little plastic cards |
| Base price | 300 zm |
| Weight | 0 |
| Material | plastic |
| Monster use | Will not be used by monsters. |
A pack of floppies is a tool in that appears in NetHack: The Next Generation and SlashTHEM. It is made of plastic, and appears as a box containing little plastic cards when unidentified.
A pack of floppies is the base item for two quest artifacts: The Nethack Sources and the Master Boot Disk.
Contents
Generation
Geeks and Hackers start with a pack of floppies in their inventory.
Description
A Geek or Hacker can "read" the contents of floppies by applying them while not blind, revealing one of six potential disk labels at random:
- Microsoft Windows 3.1
- Bill Gates
- Leisure Suit Larry V
- LINUX 1.00
- your NetHack patches
- "nothing of importance"
Reading "Microsoft Windows 3.1" will print YAFM and cause you to become confused for 50-100 turns, while finding "Bill Gates" also prints YAFM, but has no other effect. The other disk labels have no effect when read.
Strategy
Most roles will have no use for a pack of floppies. However, Geeks and Graduates can use them to reap the benefits of reading certain scrolls while confused - a non-cursed unicorn horn is ideal to cure the confusion afterward.
Origin
Floppy disks are a dated form of data storage used from the 1960s to the 1990s, consisting of circular pieces of a flexible material on which the data is magnetically recorded. With more efficient storage media such as optical drives, flash drives, and cloud storage available to modern computer users, floppies are now rarely seen, except occasionally on legacy systems (particularly industrial equipment), and some present-day computer users have probably never used a floppy disk, or even a computer that has a floppy drive. However, during the early years of NetHack's development, floppy disks would have been a standard medium for storing and exchanging files, including personal copies of the NetHack source and patches, so they appear as part of the starting inventory of the Geek, a tribute to NetHack players.
Floppy disks came in a variety of form factors, but the most prominent sizes were the original 8" disks used on business systems, the 5.25" disks ('mini-floppies') common to the Apple II and early PCs, and the 3.5" disks ('micro-floppies') used on Macs and later PCs. The name "floppy disks" is somewhat counterintuitive when used to describe the later 3.5" disks: these have a rigid plastic case, and hence are not "floppy". However, earlier floppy disks, like the 5.25" and 8" disks, had a flexible case, and were thus known as "floppy" disks since their invention circa 1970. This item's unidentified description "box containing little plastic cards" suggests that these disks are in fact 3.5" disks.
Floppy disks varied greatly in capacity, depending both on the "density" of the disk itself, whether one or both sides were used, and the geometric pattern used by the floppy drive to record data on the disk. A single-sided 5.25" floppy could have as little as 140KB of usable storage, while the largest "common" floppy capacity was 1.44MB for 3.5" disks (though limited numbers of 2.88MB disks and drives were produced). Later proprietary "superfloppy" systems such as Iomega zip disks had capacities of up to 750MB, but these never gained wide acceptance, being incompatible with existing disks and emerging only shortly before more practical solutions such as rewritable CDs and USB flash drives.
It is possible to access 3.5" disks on virtually any modern computer: USB floppy drives are common, and drivers to read the disks are still present in modern editions of Linux. However, options for reading older disks are quite limited: there are no USB 5.25" or 8" drives available, and no modern operating systems support them. Outside of specialized devices, the best option is to set up a "period" computer with the appropriate diskette drive, and some way of communicating with more modern hardware (e.g. a network connection, serial port, or even simply a 3.5" floppy drive).
