FLOPCON was more of a hack. See, Floplink, getting Uplink on a floppy disk, didn't remove any content bar the large percentage of a file that was not needed. No sounds were lost, or anything else.

However, since DEFCON uses a 60MB sounds file, this'd be impossible to do normally, ergo we have to do the unthinkable... drop the sounds (and a whole lot more. We'll get to that in a sec)

The first thing to note about DEFCON is it's size. Everything (including sounds!) comes to a total of 58.6MB. Dropping the sounds.dat gives us a nice small 1.54MB. There's work to be done however, so lets start.

The first thing to do is to empty sounds.dat Thing is, we need to make an empty RAR file, since that's all that sounds.dat is. Thankfully, if you have WinRAR installed, just right click, go to New, and select "WinRAR Archive". Name it sounds.dat (after removing the old one), and you're done.

Starting DEFCON now would crash it, however. So we need to tell DEFCON that there is to be no sound. This can be done quickly. Extract main.dat to a folder, so you can edit its contents.

In the /data folder, find the file called sounds.txt. Remove it. Also remove sounds_minimal.txt. Rename sounds_nosounds.txt to sounds.txt, and you're done.

You can also clean this directory up. After all, each byte saved is worth it. Remove the non-needed files:

Now, there's one last step to do here. If you have a decent editing program, you can automate this, but even MS Paint users can get down here. Start by looking at each bitmap file. If there's only two colours (the non 'blur' ones, basically), then re-save them as a 2-bit bitmap. (MSpaint will call this a Monocrome Bitmap)

This has the effect of drastically dropping the filesize of most of the bitmaps. As an example, airbase.bmp before re-saving is a massive 48KB; after the resave it's a tiny 2.06KB, a reduction of 95.7%

Doing this to all of them takes /grahpics from 3.44MB to 2.48MB. Do not forget that we are also going to re-compress this data back into the main.dat when we're done, so we should see a huge decrease in overall size.

Next do the same to the files in /earth, but ONLY edit these files:

You can also empty coastlines-low.dat, assuming you never use that option. It'll save 91.1KB

Re-save all the files in /fonts. This makes a large gain, 2MB down to 512KB.

In /gui, you can, for saving space, re-save the demo.bmp, demo_macos.bmp and demo_steam.bmp as 2-bit BMP's. This saves us a bit more space (1.14MB to 89.2KB). The tick and lock file can also be re-saved as 2-bit files, although unless you want the GUI to look bad, don't edit the rest. The die-hard people can also re-save the introversion and ambrosia bitmaps as well. This'll take /gui from 3.5MB to 1MB.

You now want to re-compress the data folder into main.dat. Using WinRAR, make sure to select 'Best' under compression method, and click OK. After that has been done, re-open the dat file in WinRAR, and remove EVERY thumbs.db file. This is critical in saving space.

You should now hold a 583KB main.dat, down from the 962KB of the original. This takes our FLOPCON down to a nice 1.17MB. At this point you're done. Be happy in the fact that you can now fit DEFCON on a floppy disk.

There are things to note, however. Don't EVER take a screenshot while running FLOPCON. This'll crash DEFCON without haste, as the floppy disk runs out of space and the lack of error handling in DEFCON shows this too quickily. You should also clear the game-history file to save space. If you fall out of desync, you do run the risk of running out of space (and crashing DEFCON), but as long as you keep an eye on the status of sync logs, you should be fine.

FLOPCON also takes a while to load. This is normal. Floppy disks are horribly slow and should never be used. Don't be cheap and skip on a nice large USB key. Even a 1GB one is DIRT cheap these days, and you can fit ALL of DEFCON on it a million times! (or there abouts...)