Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20171111143841/@comment-1496755-20171215220750

I called city hall and it seems I am still single. Sorry if anyone is disappointed :P

Working with floppies was pretty similar to working with CD's, except that their capacity was very small (1.44 MB) as opposed to a CD's 650 - 700 MB. And this is why you had so many of them - each contained a small piece of the program you wanted to install, and thus had to change them throughout the process. If you tried to put a modern game on floppy disks, it would take hundreds and thousands of them, and you'd have to sell the game in large shipping crates :P

A phenomenon often observed in the mid-1990's was games having two versions - floppy and CD version. The main difference was that the CD version usually had some extra stuff due to the larger data capacity, e.g. actual video clips, full speech, or even hi-res textures. Besides, hard drives were much smaller than they are nowadays, which meant it was preferable to keep this large stuff (videos, especially) on the CD, while only the essential game files were installed on the hard drive. Some games featured several levels of installation - from minimal one (10 MB or less) to maximum one, which also copied the cutscenes (Dark Forces, Descent 2, and Quake 2 are good examples of this). CD versions also usually did not include the copy protection mechanisms of the floppy version, since having the CD in drive was considered sufficient protection (there was no way to copy a CD in the early days, unless you knew a guy with professional equipment).

And, of course, the floppy versions were trimmed down - no video cutscenes but rather still shots or some other simple solution, no speech but text only... and copy protection that asks for codes from the manual of something like that (some even had code wheels - very hard to replicate).