Playing with Floppy Disks — Literally!

There was always something intrinsically satisfying about ejecting and inserting a floppy disk, which is something most of us no longer get to experience. That disappointed Igor Brkić, so he built this interactive game that involves moving floppy disks around an array of drives.

Floppy Flopper is a big welded-steel contraption that contains nine floppy disk drives arranged in a 3×3 grid. The player starts with a handful of floppy disks in various colors. When the gameplay starts, the indicator light above a random drive will illuminate in a particular color. The player must then insert a matching floppy disk into that drive in a set amount of time and then the process repeats. As the game progresses, the amount of time available decreases. The player’s score is based on the number of successful insertions.

To make that work, Brkić designed a custom control board for each floppy disk drive. It doesn’t need to read a disk’s full data and instead just checks the write protection and density holes. Those are enough to create unique identifiers for the colors used in the gameplay.

The drive controllers then communicate with a central controller, which handles the game logic. That central controller also has a display to show the score and a big button to start a game.

If you want to build your own Floppy Flopper, Brkić uploaded the code and design files to Bitbucket.