The Allure of Floppy Disks: A Futuristic Solution for Modern Devices?

In today's world of advanced smartphones and tablets, it's hard to imagine a time when computers didn't come equipped with high-speed processing power and vast storage capacities. However, as I sit here pondering the capabilities of modern devices, I find myself wondering what they could really use: floppy disks.

Yes, you read that right – floppy friggin' disks and drives alongside them. And, I must say, I think we can accomplish that! To make this work, all we need is a phone, which I'll be using my Note 8 for. It's not sponsored, just what I have on hand. A floppy disk drive in particular, one that runs using USB, would be the key to this operation. And, of course, I've applied a woodgrain coating to it – because, well, you know me! I don't know the brand name or model number, but any generic one from Goodwill should work.

We'll also need a floppy disk to write to and read from. Luckily, I have a high-density three-and-a-half-inch disk here that we can fill with all sorts of unscrupulous nonsense. And, finally, we'll require one of these USB connectors or on-the-go cables/adapters – whatever you want to call them. This particular one hasn't been opened yet; it came packaged with my phone, which was quite nice. It's just an on-the-go OTG adapter and this will allow us to convert the USB portion of our phone (in this case, USB C) to a full-sized USB port.

To make this work, we'll need to plug in the OTG adapter right onto the end of the USB cable of the floppy disk drive, then plug that into the phone. And, voila! We should be able to see the light come on as the device recognizes it. Plugging in a disk yields floppy disk noises as the phone attempts to read from it. Now, let's get this started and take care of something on a Windows 98 PC.

I'll be using the recently-rebuilt Lazy Green Giant to write some content onto the disk. And, we have an installation here for Commander Keen Episode One: Invasion of the Vorticons – the shareware episode that will easily fit onto the disk itself.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enGreetings and welcome to an LGR thing!And today I was just thinking aboutmodern smartphones and tablets and other such devices. They're pretty neat andsmart and things. But you know what theycould really use? Floppy drives.Yes. That's right.Floppy friggin disks and drives to goalong with them. And you know what? Ithink we can accomplish that!So to do this all we really need is: a phone, I'm gonna be using my Note 8. It's notsponsored, it's just what I have. And afloppy disk drive and in particular athree-and-a-half inch floppy disk drivethat runs using USB. One that I haveapplied a woodgrain coating to, becauseof course I did! And yeah, I don't knowwhat brand this is, what it is. Prettymuch any of them should work, it's just ageneric one I got from Goodwill. And we'llof course need a floppy disk to write toand read from. I have a high-densitythree and a half inch disk here that wecan fill with all sorts of unscrupulousnonsense. And last but definitely notleast is one of these USB connectors, oron-the-gocables or adapters, whatever you want tocall them. In fact this one I haven'teven opened yet. It actually just camepackaged with my phone, which was quitenice. It's just an on-the-go, OTG adapterand this will allow you to convert theUSB portion of your phone, in this caseit's USB C, to USB Type A. You know, fullsized USB port. So I'll just plug in theOTG adapter right there on the endof the USB cable of the floppy diskdrive, plug that into the phone, andyou'll be able to see the light come on.And if we plug in a disk...Yeah. We get floppy disk noises as thephone is attempting to read from thedisk. And at the moment there's nothingon it so let's go ahead and take care ofthat on a Windows 98 PC. So I'm going to beusing the recently-rebuilt Lazy GreenGiant to write some stuff onto the disk.And we have an installation here forCommander Keen Episode One: Invasion ofthe Vorticons. The shareware episode,which will easily fit onto the disk itself.\"Thanks for installing the sharewareepisode of Commander Keen!\" You're quitewelcome, early 90s installation program.So we have the game installed on thedisk right there, so we should be able to run it like this. And it of course will be justfine, because why wouldn't it be.So yeah let's go ahead and do the samething on the phone and see what happenswith a floppy drive attached to it!Okay, now that the disk is full of thingslet's plug it back in and see what happens.It could take a little while herefor it to read what I believe is theentire contents of the disk. It mayactually be loading everything directlyfrom here into memory, just so it knowshow to read it from the filesystem.And there you go it shows up as a Y-E Data USB drive. And so you can tap thereto transfer the files and these are allthe ones that we just copied over. And ofcourse being that these are meant forMS-DOS, like, if we're trying to open anexecutable it's like, \"oh you don't haveany apps that can do that.\" Well Iactually do, so let's go and open one ofthose apps. For this I'm going to beusing an app called Magic DOSBox, whichis just a DOSBox variant made forAndroid. And I find it to be quite nice.It is a paid-for app, or at least thisversion is, but in my experience it's about the bestDOSBox version for Android at the moment. You can see I have jewel of the junglealready installed but we're going to addthe version of Commander Keen that wecopied over to the floppy disk.And it's already seeing something there. Now theway this version of DOSBox works is youconfigure each individual little icon, orprogram, to show up on your main menu by going through here. And you select all ofthe different features that you wouldnormally in DOSBox. In particular we'rejust going to make it boot directly intothis game. And I'm gonna just leave it onthe disk, I don't even want to copy itover to the internal memory of the phoneor anything. Global settings... So if we gointo here we can show the detectedstorage devices and we have this oneright here which is the floppy diskdrive. It says it's read-only access, soif we hit \"request permissions\" thisbrings up the Android requestpermissions thing. We have \"nonsense.\"I just hit select there and we'll see ifwe can do anything with it now. Yes,we can, we have full access to \"Disk 0\" as it is now, zero point zero gigabytes!So we'll go back here and do the \"plus new game\" and now we should be able to choosethe floppy disk. Yes, we can directlyright here, Disk 0. So we'll just choosethe main folder here and that is that.We'll type in the name, Commander Keen 1.And it's already enabled it for us onthe main menu here, so if we wanted toin Magic DOS Box we can adjust all sorts of other settings. We do want the PC speakerbecause, that is what that is. No soundcard, we don't even need to bother withthat. We could even change the icon if wewanted to, so if we want to giveCommander Keen a nice little display onour menu we could do that. But this isprobably the more important thing forthis individual program, which ischoosing the main program. Which is going to be keen1.exe, so there we go.So now when we tap this we should just go directly into Commander Keen Episode 1.Booting directly from the floppy disk.Yep it sees it there in the DOSBoxcommand prompt. And there we go.Wow. That's awesome!This is the first time I've actually loadedsomething directly from a floppy diskand not just like, copying it first overinto the internal memory. This is reallycool, let me get the camera a little moreadjusted. Check that out. So we can'tactually tap on the screen or doanything unless we were to configure itto be able to do that. So we can addvirtual buttons or we can just bring upa virtual keyboard here. Press Enter.Could start a new game.Yeah.And obviously this is not ideal Even the virtual buttons that this program has,while impressive in their own right,they're still not particularly great.So I can add like a virtual joystick, orreally keys, over here. And then I canapply some other keys. And yeah you seehow this is, you just sort of adddifferent keys to your screen that youcan tap on at will.Uh so yeah. It's...I don't like touchscreen controls on like any game really, unless is a game meant forjust tapping only. But you know like, thisis why I'm not a fan of emulated gameson Android, iOS. So you either have to plug in an external controller to really getsome sort of good experience, in myopinion. Or we could try plugging in anactual keyboard. And this is an IBM ModelM. It has a PS/2 connection. And if youremember some time ago I did a videoabout plugging in one of these into anAndroid phone just through one of theselittle USB PS/2 adapters. That's totallydoable but of course we only have theone port, so that means we're gonna needa USB hub. This is something I admit I have not yet attempted. But I don't know,in theory it should work. So I just grabbeda cheap hub online and I should be ableto just plug stuff in here andand make things happen. Okay, plug in thekeyboard right here, the disk drive rightthere, adapter right there. And then we'llsee what happens when we plug it intothe phone. Suffice to say, do not try thisat home. I cannot be responsible if youover voltage your phone or something.So that's a good sign, we've got the USBfloppy drive attached, and then physicalkeyboard settings popping up here. Whichthat looks good.And yeah you could see me hitting left and right on the arrow keys, the keyboard doesappear to be working. So let's try itwith DOSBox. I really need like, a standor something for this. Hmm. Can I just putit there? You know I'm just gonna put itthere. All right, once again I have nottested this yet so I don't know how wellthis program is meant to work with aphysical keyboard. But let's just open upCommander Keen and see what happens. Once again loading directly from that floppydisk, which amuses me endlessly... and itseems to be doing it at the, you know,a pretty good comparable speed to like anactual PC of the time. If it wereconnected to it physically, internally inanything, so. Okay let's see--oh it worksperfectly! Oh yeah. Yeah this is how I would hope to play DOSBox on a phone.With the friggin Model M keyboard andan actual floppy drive loading fromactual floppy disks.Oh it's wonderful!Oh man. Excuse my giddiness but--nah man!Embrace my giddiness because I amgenuinely having fun with this! This isso cool! Dude. \"Quit to DOS.\" Let's try Jill of the Jungle. I know it's not on--oh heywe're right back to DOS. Hi there,DOS. Yeah anyway, let's exit out of this.Now I just want to try Jill of the junglefor, well. Yeah, see I had thevirtual things installed and I justdon't want to do that man. Get rid ofthose. Goodbye screen widgets, I don'tneed you anymore.Yeah.Jill of the Jungle.On Android! Not loading from floppydisk, but if I wanted to I really could.Okay, well at this point now I guess I'mjust sort of getting off track.I'm just amused--oh wrong button. I amjust amused by anything that involvesplugging in like, legacy hardware tomodern hardware. And I know it's like,it's built to do that. On the surfaceit's not impressive, but there's stillsomething amusing about--dang it--aboutseeing it in action. All right well, that'spretty much it for this video. I justwant to show that it is indeed possible.And not only that but it works pretty well.In fact, it looks like it does cachestuff to internal memory in some way.I mean, I guess I would expect it to.It would do that normally on a regularPC if you're just running somethingdirectly off of a floppy, it copying intoRAM. But I was kind of surprised, curious,whatever, seeing if it would do it evenwithin the emulator here when I \"turn off\"the emulation. And it seems to, like nowthe floppy drive is not plugged in,nothing is plugged in, so it's notcopying everything directly. Probablyjust had it saved to its own internalRAM so that it doesn't have to load itall completely off the floppy disk atfirst. I don't know, I'm just guessing.Anyway, thank you very much for watching this little experimentation. Perhapsyou've already seen this done before.Maybe you've done it yourself, you'vebeen doing it for years and this isnothing new. But for me, it was at leastsomething a little different. And ifyou'd like to see my older video where Icovered plugging in a Model M into anAndroid device you can click that orstick around to see any of my othervideos, there's new ones every week.And as always thank you very much forwatching!\n"