I'm going to admit something here. I've never once touched a floppy disk with my bare hands. Yet, I somehow feel quite a bit of nostalgia for the old bit of tech. That's why my eye was immediately drawn to a device built to play whack-a-mole with what many people my age consider the 'save symbol'.
Rob Smith Dev has shared on their YouTube channel over two videos (1, 2) of them building the game (via Hackaday), called DiskFight. The Amiga-based machine challenges you with popping in floppy disks at high speed to gain points. Smith created their own linear actuators to load underneath the floppy disks, to give springs under the floppy disk the force to either entirely bounce out of their holder, or press up just a little.
The intent of this actuator is to make it so that the five floppy disks will either require pressing in with a simple push of a finger, or picking up from the desk and putting them back in their original slot. Alright, it's a little less whack-a-mole, and a little more 'gently pick up a mole and put it back in its home' but I think I may actually prefer the latter idea. We at PC Gamer don't endorse hitting moles.
The box for the floppy disk game was 3D printed, then put together with screws, glue, and pure tech determination. Smith put the entire building process in the latter half of the first video, sped up with dance music in the background. The software was all built in AMOS, the programming language for Amiga computers.
For the 30 seconds the game lasts, Smith reached out to a musician named Hoffman to generate thirty seconds of music. Hoffman uses retro devices to make his music (and even does Amiga DJ sets).
Hoffman's song for DiskFight starts slow and builds to match the rising intensity of the game. The tune in question, called Disk Menace, is an Amiga-generated drum and bass song that does get quite intense as the thirty seconds come to a close.
Smith put out a YouTube Short of the game being played, and it looks about as hectic as you would expect. Naturally, floppy disks being shot out of ports end up with the user becoming quite frazzled as the last couple of seconds go by. Notably, the image at the top right indicates it's only on easy mode.
I know retro games are considered a bit hard, so it seems pretty fitting that DiskFight won its first recorded outing.
