HOW BIG IT WAS

Second Reality shipped as two files. Nineteen parts, an hour of engineering per second of runtime, and all of the artwork:

  SECOND.EXE    1,451,077   the loader, with all 79 part files
                            appended to it — 22 executables and
                            57 data files, XOR-obfuscated, no
                            directory a stranger could read
  REALITY.FC      992,188   a 16-byte header and the two S3Ms,
                            stored plain
                ─────────
                2,443,265   2.33 MiB, and 41% of it is music

Those are the sizes the build itself recorded: PACK.C appends every file in DATA\ to a copy of the loader and writes the offsets and lengths out as PACKING.INC, which the loader is then assembled around. The shipped copy of that table is still in the release, so the byte counts above are not an estimate.

What is left after the music is 1.42 MB — and every part executable in it is PKLITE-compressed, so that is 1.42 MB of already compressed code and art. It ran on a 386 in 570,000 bytes of free conventional memory.

IT DID NOT FIT ON A FLOPPY

Two files at 2.33 MiB do not go onto a 1.44 MB disk, and Future Crew did not pretend otherwise. The demo was released as two archives, one per disk:

  2NDREAL1.ZIP   and   2NDREAL2.ZIP

      "You must unpack both zip-files to the same directory
       before the demo can be run."          — README.1ST

The BBS file descriptions that shipped in the release settle it beyond the prose: FILE_ID.1 and FILE_ID.2 are the same ANSI logo, numbered 1/2 and 2/2 in the top right corner. Second Reality arrived on two floppies.

How close it was: a 1.44 MB disk formats to 1,474,560 bytes, and SECOND.EXE is 1,451,077 of them. The loader and all 79 parts clear a floppy by 23,483 bytes — before the music has been put anywhere.