What? How? It's 2024?!

So it turns out that if you try hard enough, you can buy a floppy drive in a physical store in 2024! That is already something but it gets even cooler when you realize you can fit a whole level editor on a floppy. So that is exactly what I did. ZLE on Windows is currently ~1.3 MB which can fit on a 1.44 MB floppy disk.

Why?

I am completely aware that in 2024, floppy disks are a thing of the past. However, I never played with floppies before, and even though they might not have any use in their physical form, video games constantly use floppies as an icon for saving. And also it feels dope to have a "physical" copy of ZLE. 

Any issues?

While it is fun to mess with this old tech, there were many issues with getting this to work. All of these issues are related to the floppy drive. My first test was on a broken floppy drive which ended up killing 3 "brand new" floppies. Then I switched to another one which seemed to work mostly. However, it was still very unreliable. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Although it is a miracle that floppy drivers exist for Windows 10 in the first place.

I found that the file explorer is a no-go for floppies. It just likes to cache and that takes over 2 minutes to finish. The command prompt was far better. 

In the end, I installed Ubuntu on this PC with a floppy and it seemed to work much better. Unfortunately, it seems like the floppy drive broke after being used for 10 minutes. Or the floppy died. No idea honestly, it is just so random. I see why floppies aren't used anymore.