Greetings and welcome to an LGR thing! And today I was just thinking about
modern smartphones and tablets and other such devices. They're pretty neat and
smart and things. But you know what they could really use? Floppy drives.
Yes. That's right. Floppy friggin disks and drives to go
along with them. And you know what? I think 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 not
sponsored, it's just what I have. And a floppy disk drive and in particular a
three-and-a-half inch floppy disk drive that runs using USB. One that I have
applied a woodgrain coating to, because of course I did! And yeah, I don't know
what brand this is, what it is. Pretty much any of them should work, it's just a
generic one I got from Goodwill. And we'll of course need a floppy disk to write to
and read from. I have a high-density three and a half inch disk here that we
can fill with all sorts of unscrupulous nonsense. And last but definitely not
least is one of these USB connectors, or on-the-go
cables or adapters, whatever you want to call them. In fact this one I haven't
even opened yet. It actually just came packaged with my phone, which was quite
nice. It's just an on-the-go, OTG adapter and this will allow you to convert the
USB portion of your phone, in this case it's USB C, to USB Type A. You know, full
sized USB port. So I'll just plug in the OTG adapter right there on the end
of the USB cable of the floppy disk drive, plug that into the phone, and
you'll be able to see the light come on. And if we plug in a disk...
[floppy disk noises]
Yeah. We get floppy disk noises as the phone is attempting to read from the
disk. And at the moment there's nothing on it so let's go ahead and take care of
that on a Windows 98 PC. So I'm going to be
using the recently-rebuilt Lazy Green Giant to write some stuff onto the disk.
[click keyboard typing]
And we have an installation here for Commander Keen Episode One: Invasion of
the Vorticons. The shareware episode, which will easily fit onto the disk itself.
[more typing]
[disk drive writing sounds]
"Thanks for installing the shareware episode of Commander Keen!" You're quite
welcome, early 90s installation program. So we have the game installed on the
disk right there, so we should be able to run it like this. And it of course will be just
fine, because why wouldn't it be. So yeah let's go ahead and do the same
thing on the phone and see what happens with a floppy drive attached to it!
[click, shunk]
Okay, now that the disk is full of things let's plug it back in and see what happens.
[floppy drive read head noises]
It could take a little while here for it to read what I believe is the
entire contents of the disk. It may actually be loading everything directly
from here into memory, just so it knows how 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 there
to transfer the files and these are all the ones that we just copied over. And of
course being that these are meant for MS-DOS, like, if we're trying to open an
executable it's like, "oh you don't have any apps that can do that." Well I
actually do, so let's go and open one of those apps. For this I'm going to be
using an app called Magic DOSBox, which is just a DOSBox variant made for
Android. And I find it to be quite nice. It is a paid-for app, or at least this
version is, but in my experience it's about the best
DOSBox version for Android at the moment. You can see I have jewel of the jungle
already installed but we're going to add the version of Commander Keen that we
copied over to the floppy disk. [disk loading sounds]
And it's already seeing something there. Now the
way this version of DOSBox works is you configure each individual little icon, or
program, to show up on your main menu by going through here. And you select all of
the different features that you would normally in DOSBox. In particular we're
just going to make it boot directly into this game. And I'm gonna just leave it on
the disk, I don't even want to copy it over to the internal memory of the phone
or anything. Global settings... So if we go into here we can show the detected
storage devices and we have this one right here which is the floppy disk
drive. It says it's read-only access, so if we hit "request permissions" this
brings up the Android request permissions thing. We have "nonsense."
I just hit select there and we'll see if we 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 choose
the floppy disk. Yes, we can directly right here, Disk 0. So we'll just choose
the main folder here and that is that. We'll type in the name, Commander Keen 1.
And it's already enabled it for us on the main menu here, so if we wanted to
in Magic DOS Box we can adjust all sorts of other settings. We do want the PC speaker
because, that is what that is. No sound card, we don't even need to bother with
that. We could even change the icon if we wanted to, so if we want to give
Commander Keen a nice little display on our menu we could do that. But this is
probably the more important thing for this individual program, which is
choosing 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 DOSBox
command prompt. And there we go.
Wow. That's awesome!
This is the first time I've actually loaded something directly from a floppy disk
and not just like, copying it first over into the internal memory. This is really
cool, let me get the camera a little more adjusted. Check that out. So we can't
actually tap on the screen or do anything unless we were to configure it
to be able to do that. So we can add virtual buttons or we can just bring up
a virtual keyboard here. Press Enter. Could start a new game.
[chuckles to himself] Yeah. [PC speaker noises play]
And obviously this is not ideal [laughs] 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, or really keys, over here. And then I can
apply some other keys. And yeah you see how this is, you just sort of add
different keys to your screen that you can tap on at will.
[squeaky Keen gameplay sounds]
Uh so yeah. It's...
I don't like touchscreen controls on like any game really, unless is a game meant for
just tapping only. But you know like, this is why I'm not a fan of emulated games
on Android, iOS. So you either have to plug in an external controller to really get
some sort of good experience, in my opinion. Or we could try plugging in an
actual keyboard. And this is an IBM Model M. It has a PS/2 connection. And if you
remember some time ago I did a video about plugging in one of these into an
Android phone just through one of these little USB PS/2 adapters. That's totally
doable but of course we only have the one port, so that means we're gonna need
a 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 grabbed a cheap hub online and I should be able
to just plug stuff in here and and make things happen. Okay, plug in the
keyboard right here, the disk drive right there, adapter right there. And then we'll
see what happens when we plug it into the phone. Suffice to say, do not try this
at home. I cannot be responsible if you over voltage your phone or something.
[phone notifications play as devices are recognized]
So that's a good sign, we've got the USB floppy drive attached, and then physical
keyboard settings popping up here. Which that looks good.
[clicking arrow keys]
And yeah you could see me hitting left and right on the arrow keys, the keyboard does
appear to be working. So let's try it with DOSBox. I really need like, a stand
or something for this. Hmm. Can I just put it there? You know I'm just gonna put it
there. All right, once again I have not tested this yet so I don't know how well
this program is meant to work with a physical keyboard. But let's just open up
Commander Keen and see what happens. Once again loading directly from that floppy
disk, which amuses me endlessly... and it seems to be doing it at the, you know,
a pretty good comparable speed to like an actual PC of the time. If it were
connected to it physically, internally in anything, so. Okay let's see--oh it works
perfectly! [laughs] Oh yeah. Yeah this is how I would hope to play DOSBox on a phone.
With the friggin Model M keyboard and an actual floppy drive loading from
actual floppy disks. [PC speaker sounds]
Oh it's wonderful! [just laughs, amused at the silliness]
Oh man. Excuse my giddiness but--nah man!
Embrace my giddiness because I am genuinely having fun with this! This is
so cool! Dude. "Quit to DOS." Let's try Jill of the Jungle. I know it's not on--oh hey
we'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 jungle for, well. Yeah, see I had the
virtual things installed and I just don't want to do that man. Get rid of
those. Goodbye screen widgets, I don't need you anymore.
[Jill music plays] Yeah.
Jill of the Jungle.
On Android! Not loading from floppy disk, but if I wanted to I really could.
Okay, well at this point now I guess I'm just sort of getting off track.
I'm just amused--oh wrong button. I am just amused by anything that involves
plugging in like, legacy hardware to modern hardware. And I know it's like,
it's built to do that. On the surface it's not impressive, but there's still
something amusing about--dang it--about seeing it in action. All right well, that's
pretty much it for this video. I just want to show that it is indeed possible.
And not only that but it works pretty well. In fact, it looks like it does cache
stuff to internal memory in some way. I mean, I guess I would expect it to.
It would do that normally on a regular PC if you're just running something
directly off of a floppy, it copying into RAM. But I was kind of surprised, curious,
whatever, seeing if it would do it even within the emulator here when I "turn off"
the emulation. And it seems to, like now the floppy drive is not plugged in,
nothing is plugged in, so it's not copying everything directly. Probably
just had it saved to its own internal RAM so that it doesn't have to load it
all completely off the floppy disk at first. I don't know, I'm just guessing.
Anyway, thank you very much for watching this little experimentation. Perhaps
you've already seen this done before. Maybe you've done it yourself, you've
been doing it for years and this is nothing new. But for me, it was at least
something a little different. And if you'd like to see my older video where I
covered plugging in a Model M into an Android device you can click that or
stick around to see any of my other videos, there's new ones every week.
And as always thank you very much for watching!