mariobgm

We’re constantly amazed by the creative ways people come up with to reuse defunct technology, and here’s another one to blow your mind. One YouTuber has used his programming and music skills to reproduce popular tunes and game music using… floppy disk drives!

With the rapid progression of technology many things fall by the wayside never to be used again. Remember cassette tapes? No? How about CDs? Just about, huh? Some kids today probably don’t even realize that you used to have to buy your music in a physical format.

In the world of computers, one such obsolete technology is the floppy disk.

Once upon a time, you had to have a whole library of the things just for your Word documents, deleting files whenever you could to make space and worrying that your data would get corrupted by ejecting the disk too early, but these days you can carry around your entire media library on a tiny USB stick. Despite our fond memories of the past, I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who would actually rather we returned to the days of watching your file sizes like some people watch their weight. However, one person has found a new use for all those old disk drives he–for whatever reason–had lying around.

Anand Jain, known as MrSolidSnake745 on YouTube, uses floppy disk drives to recreate music from retro games along with other popular tunes.

It all began back in October 2011 when he used three drives to play the Imperial March from Star Wars. He now has a setup of eight drives and has created around 60 songs with his floppy drive orchestra that you can download for free here.

Using the sound of the drives reading, Señor Snake somehow perfectly recreated the songs of gaming from your youth. It’s a nostalgia overload!

Check out some of his videos below.

▼ Super Mario World – Athlete’s Rag on Eight Floppy Drives.

▼ Here’s the original song for comparison.

▼ And for you young ‘uns who never had the joy (?) of hearing it, here’s the sound of a 3.5″ floppy disc.

▼ Final Fantasy VII – Those Who Fight Further on Sixteen Floppy Drives.

▼ The original boss theme.

▼ Song name? Darude – Sandstorm. Seriously.

Pretty impressive, no? If you’re a big fan of his creative work you can support Anand on Patreon here.

Source/feature image: YouTube

[ Read in Japanese ]