Oh cool! I had to use something kinda like this for operating an old CNC machine in the 2nd machine shop I ever worked at. It was a 3.5" floppy that had a whole desktop as a controller box and let you hook the disk up as a network adapter of sorts. This let us stream g code to the machine for long programs of several gigabytes, where the machine was originally designed to do all the IO through the floppy drive. Pretty cool, but if you wanted to change the active program, you HAD to shut down the CNC machine, remove the disk, restart the CNC machine, insert the disk and select the correct folder paths and program on the first try. If you went i to the wrong folder there was no way to back out, and if you selected the wrong program, you had to shut it all down and start again every time. Took like 40 mins every time you screwed up, which was fairly often, since the CAM guy didn't give a single crap about useful or intuitive file names, so the folders would be random dates and customer numbers, and the files would be dozens of randome alphanumeric gibberish, all dumped in random spots on the drive.
Sounds like an early floppy disk emulator or maybe a specialized spinoff of one. I have to imagine many businesses were very excited whenever the first floppy disk emulator came out that just fit where the original drive went and took usb media.
is much more complex that i was imagine it, i was expecting to see just one chip-on-board (or "black blob") a magnetic coil and some resistors and capacitors but it have a lot more things, thank you for tearing it down to see What's inside. and that repair was excellent
Well, it's not actually as simple as playing from headphone jack in car cassette stereo. Floppy disks are actually holding digital data, so naturally there does have to be some sort of controller that does the conversion.
I often thought it would be impressive to have one of those MP3 tape adaptor thingies that powered itself through a little generator inside, driven by the tape motor, or the same thing in the floppy disk model driven by the spindle. Much easier to go with batteries I suppose but not nearly as nifty.
It would be impressive and convenient if it was possible, but the spindles turn so slowly and slip so easily that I doubt they could transfer much power. Even if they did, having more resistance than a standard tape could damage the tape drive motor. The floppy disk spindle turns significantly faster so I wouldn't say it couldn't be done.
That's actually not really an option, given the speed varies a little bit. But it would be cool to see the actual tape mechanism to control the playback. Based on how fast the spool rotates, and in which direction, the MP3 player actually plays like tape.
@@drewzero1 There is no such mechanical transfer in either of these, the Cassette adapter or the (Remarkable!) diskette adapter. Both operate on the same principles. Each assumes a standard "home" position, and one of those makes good sense. The driving of gears/cogs/splines is in no way involved in the transmission of information, at all. This mechanical behavior is only meant to provide users with a representation of their data be it audio, vidio, or textual, to emulate in time what was once done in space to deliver stored information whole. I like questions like this.
Despite using computers since the mid '90s. I had no idea these things existed! Thanks for demonstrating this unique technology, and showing what the insides look like.
Although I still have a stack of floppys in my office, I'm blown away at how storage efficient fully functional programs were back then. I also remember filling an entire floppy with only a few 'high res' images. _At the time it was better to just print the image after you waited for it to load, and save it to a physical file._
That's peak 1990s (even though the device came out in the early 2000's) Sony right there, you can see and feel the quality and thought that went into this - I almost exclusively put the first money I ever had in Sony devices, a complete Hifi-stack, Tuner, Amp, double-cassettes, MiniDisc and CD player, every portable I ever owned, Walkman, MD-Walkman, Discman... Everything was made to last, sturdy and functional, like this Floppy simulator I never even heard of before - thank you for showing it off (even though I'm 4 years late). Learning something new every day ^^
I'm still a Sony fan to this day. Even though they don't feel quite the same these days. But at least I can go back and enjoy the things I never had then.
I remember seeing these in the shops in the early 2000s, I think I saw one in a clearance bucket a David Jones. I do believe they were quite costly when they were new. Quite an ingenious idea, especially considering that until the early 2000s, nobody had a computer with a card writer in it. These floppy disk adaptors really were a stop cap solution until cheap multiple card writers became commonplace.
This is also from before USB storage was widespread, so a floppy drive might be the only way to easily get data on and off a machine. Really ingenious solution.
There were also PCMCIA Card Readers available at that time. Of course you had to have a notebook which was not uncommon at that time. I had a Toshiba Libretto 70ct which i used in combination with such card reader to store photos from the Digital Camera.
The better argument is that nearly everyone had a 3.5" floppy drive at the time, regardless of whether you had a desktop or a laptop. And you used to be able to buy single disk cases. So this would have been a fabulous solution for needing a card reader that you could just take with you.
Never heard of it or I certainly would have bought a Mavica at the time. The deal breaker for me was that the 1.44 mb floppy was shrinking fast. Yup, just one of those things that slides by and ya find out about it decades later. Whelp, now i have full reason to get an old Mavica and the fancy floppy.
I had a Mavica and I loved it. The floppy drive failed, so I bought a used one on Ebay, but the floppy drive didn't work on that one either. So I bought a GoPro. Although, I mainly just use my phone nowadays.
Conversely, I have 4 Mavicas including the FD-88 and the floppy works fine on all of them. It is probably a ticking time bomb but it is cool to take a photo and hear "tick tick tick tick tick"
This video is excellent. I would have also really liked to see the actual repair you did, and you didn't even break a sweat when that tiny little wire broke off.
Thanks for the video. I still periodically use my Sony MVC-FD95 Camera with this MSCA-FD2M Flash Floppy adapter. Sadly they stopped support on newer OS'es to read/write the floppy adapters and never did support Linux which I now run. So today, I simply pull out the flash memory card and insert it into a multi-function card reader to USB adapter and I'm still able to grab the photo's I've taken. It's amazing that this almost 25 year old 2.1 mega-pixel camera still works today. Thanks for taking us on a tour of the insides of these remarkable adapters. :)
Came across this video and decided to watch it... What a blast from the past! I had all the items you used including the camera. It also used a "superdisk" that was one gb. I also had a minidisc player/recorder that was a camera that recorded pics to a 1gb minidisc. Thanks for bringing back the memories... :)
I saw those thin coil wires when you were lifting the board, the suspense was palpable. I imagine the adapter was designed in the age of 8-16MB memory sticks and copying a 60MB file took out the batteries.
Very neat! I love stuff like this that is fairly irrelevant these days, but had its place in days gone by. That's clever how there are obviously additional communications via the magnetic head to communicate things like the adapter's battery state.
In the late 90s, I want to say 97, I purchased an Epson Photo PC digital camera. It was ahead of its time. It used a memory card of some sort( I think it was called compact flash). It was more square than rectangle. The camera even had a 3x optical zoom. I purchased a 16MB memory card and I could get about 25-30 full res images on it or about 100 low res images. I think the high res was 1600x1200 and the low res was 640x480. I never did own a camera that used floppy disks. But I almost purchased a camcorder that recorded to CD. I love old tech..
So that's how that works! I remember reading about the adapter on the feature sticker on my Mavica and wondered how they would went about it. Neat tech, but at $100, I think I would've just gone with floppies until I could afford a camera with a native card reader.
I get the impression things like this were made for the average consumer rather than the more tech savvy like us that knew how times were changing. But now we can go back and marvel at how it was done :)
Good recovery congratulations. I was wondering why no to use a head with a long gap avoiding the need for a driver, but in the end of the video I realized that without the seek time the read/write gets faster.
fascinating laptop. looked it up as a potential 98/xp retro gaming rig, 3 hours and $140 for the machine, dock, 256meg memory dimm, 160gb pata hdd, cmos battery, and cardbus wifi module i have my own on the way here.
Your video was very enlightening, and scary at the same time! Does the software/camera format the memory stick with a customized file system, or does it leave in FAT/FAT32 and can it be read in a normal memory card reader after it has been used with the floppy disk adapter?
My synth keyboard is still using floppy for samples,but this memory stick floppy disk thing itself needs additional drivers to comunicate with the atmel,I guess it's special data streams made for the windows and the drives,not very useful at all.
lol, i recognize that laptop. It's from the R505 series. I collect, restore, refurb, and repair that series as a hobby. i have an R505-DL that's currently in bits, that i'm working on. i have two functional R505-ESPs, in my collection, that i restored, and a few other R505 models in various states of repair. I also have a few docking stations, a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, and a few other accessories. Really nice little machines, for their time. Nice to see someone using one.
I didn't realize it was to park the heads, shame they couldn't do like a track detection thing! Think its all USB floppies or just that one? Based on the floppy instructions it supports or something.
That audio cassette SD card adapter/music player is pretty cool even if I don't have a need for it anymore. Plus, I always wondered how these weird Memory Stick to floppy adapters worked. Thanks!
The warm fuzzy nostalgia on seeing WinXP again was wonderful! I will likely never abandon my favourite OS being 98SE, but XP is a close second. Of the many NT incarnations, XP was _by far_ the least aggravating.
We have one of those. Got it for the Mavica mothersnail gave us when she was done with it. Slow as molassas running uphill in January. Was better off using our Mavicas with built-in memory stick capability. Wonder if the SD card version of that adapter would actually work in a Mavica...
I remember my high school was very proud to have purchased a Mavica. They used it to take digital photos at ball games to post up on the school website. I think one disk could hold about a dozen photos or so. I don' t know if they just kept a stack of disks handy, or just took photos sparingly.
I had one of these in 2001 iirc, usb sticks were not a thing, CD-R/W was a pain for files you use alot between computers, I was still on dial-up, but every computer still had a floppy drive, so a 32MB floppy disc was very useful!
Wow, I've always understood that these would work kind of like one of those tape adapters, but at the same time I've wondered about the computer aspects of them; how the drive would recognize when it had a medium in it was much higher capacity than it was designed for, and what sort of speed it would run on. I've never really had the opportunity to have one of my own of these with everything that I would need to make it work -- or at least I haven't gotten around to it -- but now this has solved my curiosity! Thanks very much for this video!
As long as the filesystem tells the computer that this "disk" is big, then the computer will just believe it. So that part is not an issue. But since the head is apparently just parked in one spot, I do wonder how the computer communicates to the adapter where it wants to read/write from. That has to happen "out-of-band", which is fine with the computer with the special driver software, but what about the cameras?
@@tylisirn Indeed, reading a single track is easy enough. But when the drive seeks to a next track, the coil should start pulsing the contents of that track. The same would apply for writes, the drive would want to read the sector address of the correct sector before writing, I suppose.
I've got one of these adapters in a drawer somewhere. Bought it used from eBay ten years ago after I received a top-end Sony Mavica floppy disc camera. I've just never gotten an original Sony Memory Stick to test it with. My original thinking was that the camera can record video, but only 30 seconds worth IIRC, which fills a normal floppy disc. So just get the adapter and you'll be able to record longer clips, right? ... but I'm willing to bet after getting more familiar with the camera that I'd be able to record MORE 30-second clips, but not one single clip that's longer than 30 seconds. The camera seems to buffer the entire clip into onboard memory and then write it out onto the floppy after recording concludes - so 30 seconds is probably still the limit for one recording. Well anyway thanks for saving me from having to take my own adapter apart to see what's inside :)
I was wondering, if you can do this with magnetic floppy disks, would it be theoretically possible to do the same with CDs? That is, have a dummy CD you can insert into a slot-loading CD player (such as in a car) and play MP3s through that
@@Austeja608 There were old caddy style CD drives though and in principle you could make a design that would just let the motor spin the center but would stay in place.
I've pondered that very question for years. Whatever system you came up with would have to allow for optical tracking, have some sort of mechanism that replicated the pits and landings of a CD that could be modulated quickly (perhaps a MEMS device?). It would have to be lightweight, and also balanced to spin without vibrating. It would be easier make a CD adapter would work only with top loading CD players. The way I imagine it, there would be an optical encoder that is spun by the CD player hub, that's used to provide synchronization info. The rotary encoder would be mechanically isolated from the rest of the adapter. There would DLP chip that would sit over top of the read laser. You would have to manually position the adapter so that the DLP chip was aligned with the laser. The main problem with this, is that you would need a micromirror device with 0.5 micron sized pixels (1000x smaller than current technology), with a refresh rate of at least 30 kHz (they top out at 240 Hz right now), to be able to reliably fool the read laser into thinking it was a CD. Another idea would be to construct the adapter so that it intercepts the beam from the laser, and then sends back it's own signal. In essence the adapter functions as a sort of fiber optic channel. This might actually be a more practical approach. The adapter could consist of tiny module that tethered to a fiber optic cable that clips directly onto the read laser carriage. Every time you wanted to use it, you have to delicately insert it into place. The fiber optic cable would connect to the rest of the adapter that would contain the optical engine, and the electronics for the flash memory storage.
I still have a REALLY cool camera that uses a 3½" floppy disk. I use it occasionally just because I too, love old tech, but cellphones have made taking pictures easy, but so much less... special🤷? Looking through the family photo albums used to be an emotional, nostalgic experience.
I got the MSAC-FD2M adapter & a 32MB Memory Stick with my Mavica FD90, and the camera says "Format Error C: 13:01" when I try to use it. The Stick reads in my USB adapter just fine and I tried reformatting it on my computer to no avail, so now, I'm thinking the button cells might be dead. Could that be the case or if there's something else I'm missing?
I did have to replace the button cells in mine, good cells are a must. Also make sure your stick is a non-PRO version and the older the better. I have seen some incompatibilities with older memory sticks working in various old Sony products and not others. Such as my white 64Gb Magic Gate stick only works in some devices for some reason.
@@JanusCycle My Stick is the older-style one; non-PRO and not the Memory Stick Duo. Sony really screwed the pooch with the different versions of Memory Stick IMO. Anyway, I think the button cells might be the problem. Edit: Yup, new button cells worked. So I can use my Mavica now; the camera did come with a floppy disk, but I need a USB floppy drive to read that.
I've always wanted to know if something like this ever existed, seeing as cassette adapters existed. Floppy drives themselves seem to be built like tanks, it's the disks themselves that's failing. Obviously floppy drive emulators exist and are still made and are obviously the preferred method, but perhaps there's a use case for a flash adapter of the disk itself, like if the drive uses a custom interface. You'd just have to make custom software to work with it of course. And I'm surprised that this isn't limited to 1.44 MB files and requiring bank switching, so this is essentially using the floppy controller to directly access the flash storage in its entirety, which begs the question if floppy controllers could theoretically see far larger disks if such a thing existed and firmware was made for it.
I wish this was still sold, specially with an usb port on it. It sounds silly, but I do love the sound of old floppies+old laptops just won't get use of the floppy image to usb switcher. They need real floppy disks
I also appreciate the sounds of old drives. Modern flash alternatives are convenient for retro computers. But keeping some working with old drives is also good.
I have one and it works well on my Digital Mavica. However, I don't have a legacy computer with native floppy disk drive so the image cannot be extracted from it. It seems that the data is not stored into the memory sticks in a memory stick way, but rather some intermediate representation for this very specific adaptor, because my computer cannot read/write the MS if I use a card reader. Can you help verify this? By the way, how did you get a screenshot of the old FlashPath website? I'll make a video about Digital Mavica's this year and I'm collecting some materials.
I don't have a working Mavica to test this. What kind of error or response do you get when trying to read the card? The FlashPath website is from archive.org Wayback Machine. Since making this video I also found the FlashPath user manual. I would have included it if I had found it earlier. archive.org/details/generalmanual_000011144/mode/2up I hope you include something about CD Mavicas in your video.
i cant be 100% Certain, but i think? they were stored in a different format, only used one *Briefly* back in highschool where one of my classes we had gone on a camping trip and had to take turns using between 3 of the later Mavica's (i think it was the FD-88 or FD90 we used i cant recall anymore the exact model and looking up online what those models look like vaugly bring an image to mind) the adapter was used only for the poor sap who wasnt lucky to use the Computer in the class w/ a memory stick reader (though most of the time we just used floppies.)
I still use my MVC-FD91 and I read the memory sticks via a memory stick to USB adapter. I needed to do this as I'm running Linux and SONY never had a driver for using the MVC Floppy adapter as a regular floppy under this OS. I just wanted to say that I have had no problem reading the photo or video files directly off the memory stick via a USB adapter, at least not under Linux (Mint ver 21.1 currently). My little USB adapter is one of those that has all the different memory card supported slots, including the old Sony Memory Stick standard. One additional side note: I've noticed the adapters need to have fresh batteries. After a time the camera will started giving "Format Error C: 13:01" when using the adapter. A new pair of coin batteries always fixes this problem.
@3:26 I had bought one from China on eBay some five years ago. It plugs into USB to charge and put songs on its built in memory rather than having as SD card. I had bought it because my car only had an integrated cassette player. Once the cassette is put in the player it works just like a normal cassette, rewind, fast forward, track search and all worked. The only difference is that it stored endless hours of songs and that messed up the tape counter. I don't think it could record like a cassette would but TB I never tried as the car stereo didn't have a record function.
2 Minutes into the video I ran to ebay and bought one of these! An Olympus one that uses SD cards. This exactly what I'm looking for. Being able to use an adapter that is pretending to actually look like the thing is amazing. Okay, now to watch the rest of the video! :D
A useful bit of kit in any time travelers tool bag. Flint lock pistol. Roman gold coins. A 1tb floppy disk containing an archive of every newspaper and most of Wikipedia.
Just come across one of these things. The memory stick doesn't seem a very firm fit, I suspect the contacts are out of alignment, so it doesn't seem to work.
Mine seems kinda loose too. But also check your memory stick. These adaptors only work with early non-Pro sticks. Worse case is you can take it apart and check inside. Hopefully not cause the same damage I did :)
Spring goes under the switch, so the device switches off when out of a floppy drive. Mine still isn't working, seems to be drawing too much current, but interesting to play with.
Thank you. I do struggle with this for some reason. I believe in part because I'm not considering TH-cam's normalization. I must do better here. I'm glad you are enjoying the videos.
I used one of these with a Pinnacle Deko video graphics system on a production truck, the only way to move bigger files back and forth, operating system was Windows NT, so no USB support!
When memory stick came out I joked that I wanted a reader for them that could address 128 of them and be wall mounted to look like a prop out of Next Generation.
A "floppy disk" which contains removable NVRAM - SD cards or whatever - would be very useful for legacy PCs which require A: drive to boot certain legacy softwares.
what if they made a memory card with the shape of a floppy disc, how much storage would that have then? My interest is maintaining the outward look of old school computers and tech but inside is operating on modern hardware.
You could probably fit a terabyte of flash memory inside a floppy disk. When you insert it into your 'floppy drive' the metal protector slide would open revealing the contact points. Smaller disk sizes would be cheaper and you could have more though. Imagine a disk box with 360Gb flash floppy disks inside would impress your friends :)
Very interesting. I originally thought that these adapters are just pin-adapters with some pins on the underside. Never thought that this would work with any ordinary PC floppy drive just using different drivers.
Do you know where to get that USB floppy drive? My aim is to obtain disk images that can be read on a Panasonic A1-GT MSX Turbo computer, and I believe it uses floppy disks.
@@JanusCycle All good, your videos are amazing and bring me a lot of nostalgic joy. I remember the N900 and Neo Freerunner days well for example and before that I ran Angstrom Linux on a PDA. To me your niche content is highly refreshing.
I've yet to find any proof an MMC version of the FlashPath ever made it to commercial sale or as an OEM product. In the late 90's I worked for a guy who has an Olympus digital camera that used SmartMedia and he had a FlashPath adapter. An MMC version probably could be physically hacked to work with SD, since SD supports MMC communication modes. MMC will work in an SD slot. I've no idea what the maximum capacity of the MMC FlashPath would be.
That is quite a claim to make. There are a couple of blurry photos of MMC Flashpath adapters in retail packaging. Beyond that I have no idea. Very interesting, thank you.
@@JanusCycle until I see a review of one (vintage or newer) or anything other than vintage advertisements or articles mentioning them, I'll assume the MMC version ended up as vaporware or at least didn't make it past the prototype/sample stage. Sort of like how so many 1980s microcomputers and game consoles had slots or connectors or other things "for future use" but they were for a future that never arrived.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but these came out when USB was starting to be fairly ubiquitous on computers and every PC had a serial and parallel port, why jump through the hoops of making a floppy adapter when you could just make a USB/serial card reader that would work just as well, if not better?
I wish my household bought more Sony stuff than just a PS1 back in the day, this would've been awesome paired with a good Mavica. Way more convenient than packing around a full size card adapter dongle.
Thanks for the video I have a working Sony mavica floppy digital camera that works great How can I tell if it supports this adapter ? The camera works with floppy disks fine
Most Mavicas from 1999 onwards work with this adapter. For example the FD73 and FD85 from 1999 do work. Search for your model with the adapter model number MSAC-FD2M
It is not necessary, since track 0 is the one that contains all the index and structure of the disk, what is done is to trick the device so that all the information is in track 0 and it is not necessary to go looking for more tracks.
Its a little neat Device. I own the original Flash Patch for the (awful) Smart Media Card and the Sony Adapter. It's really a shame that you need a real Floppy Controller so that Adapters work.
Know if the memory card have sdcard or micro, if like a slip into floppy size to appear like floppy(so actually more files can be inside)? A fake floppy? To use on computer that looks very newbie even? If a disc can be many sizes, if a tiny disc as a fake memory card(sdcard)(but actually still readable)? Because the point of reading a disc is spin, if as a cassette(cassette spin create spin for tiny disc in the cassette)? A cassette that is to have alot of tiny disc.
Oh, I miss that floppy thing. This sound of motor, this green square diod and this sound when it read data from that. I used to come to my school mate with pack of 20 floppies and copy archived games with winzip in multi volume archives. Sometimes they do not open properly, so I had to come again and copy damaged volumes once again. This is interesting item. But this is not a floppy simulator, this is a some sort of adapter, which using floppy as data transfer. But it is an interesting device. Never saw something like that.
Unfortunately that's not possible. This 'floppy disk' only works with non 'Pro' versions of Sony memory sticks which only go up to 128Mb. Those cool dual SD card adaptors are made to work with Pro memory stick devices only. I wish it were possible, but early Sony devices from the 1990s only work with early memory sticks.
A full 256MB stick wouldn't be detected. Sony changed their interface protocols after the early 128MB sticks. That's why these dual bank 128MB sticks became popular. That was the only way early devices could kinda go over 128MB.
Do you really mean SRAM, which was only used at the time of the Amiga 600 (=30 years ago)? For flash memory, these adapters did exist - I got one for SD (max 2GB) to plug into CompactFlash, which fits into PCMCIA using a mechanical adapter, as both are ISA-based. People used them to plug SD cards into their CF-based cameras. But I don't remember ever seeing one updated for SDHC/SDXC --> PC Card (PCI-based), though, you can find cardreaders for SDXC->Express-Card/34 (PCIexpress-based).
I don't like the fact that the memory stick ejects out of the adapter just as you're ejecting the floppy stick. Couldn't the memory stick have come in from the side?
Oh cool! I had to use something kinda like this for operating an old CNC machine in the 2nd machine shop I ever worked at. It was a 3.5" floppy that had a whole desktop as a controller box and let you hook the disk up as a network adapter of sorts.
This let us stream g code to the machine for long programs of several gigabytes, where the machine was originally designed to do all the IO through the floppy drive. Pretty cool, but if you wanted to change the active program, you HAD to shut down the CNC machine, remove the disk, restart the CNC machine, insert the disk and select the correct folder paths and program on the first try. If you went i to the wrong folder there was no way to back out, and if you selected the wrong program, you had to shut it all down and start again every time. Took like 40 mins every time you screwed up, which was fairly often, since the CAM guy didn't give a single crap about useful or intuitive file names, so the folders would be random dates and customer numbers, and the files would be dozens of randome alphanumeric gibberish, all dumped in random spots on the drive.
Sounds like an early floppy disk emulator or maybe a specialized spinoff of one.
I have to imagine many businesses were very excited whenever the first floppy disk emulator came out that just fit where the original drive went and took usb media.
"I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive" Nice Bladerunner quote there man!
Why doesn't anyone do the same thing today but with SD cards? It would be a big hit with retro computing enthusiasts.
There is fdd adapter that uses mmc. I think that's compatible with SD cards
Yeah but those are really hard to find. You're talking about the Flash Path floppies, right?
Probably because floppy emulators already exists. They replace the entire disk drive with one that takes in USB.
I know but it's lame. Nothing will replace the feeling of handling a floppy.
If pcs still had floppy drives id get one
is much more complex that i was imagine it, i was expecting to see just one chip-on-board (or "black blob") a magnetic coil and some resistors and capacitors but it have a lot more things, thank you for tearing it down to see What's inside. and that repair was excellent
Doesn't this void warranty? 😮
@@mrkitty777 I'm pretty sure it doesn't at this point. :D
Well, it's not actually as simple as playing from headphone jack in car cassette stereo. Floppy disks are actually holding digital data, so naturally there does have to be some sort of controller that does the conversion.
The warranty expired was a joke i was pulling a leg and kitten you 😸
I often thought it would be impressive to have one of those MP3 tape adaptor thingies that powered itself through a little generator inside, driven by the tape motor, or the same thing in the floppy disk model driven by the spindle. Much easier to go with batteries I suppose but not nearly as nifty.
It would be impressive and convenient if it was possible, but the spindles turn so slowly and slip so easily that I doubt they could transfer much power. Even if they did, having more resistance than a standard tape could damage the tape drive motor. The floppy disk spindle turns significantly faster so I wouldn't say it couldn't be done.
That's actually not really an option, given the speed varies a little bit. But it would be cool to see the actual tape mechanism to control the playback. Based on how fast the spool rotates, and in which direction, the MP3 player actually plays like tape.
This was so much easier in 8-track players, where the contacts for the next-program foil gave a little power.
@@drewzero1 There is no such mechanical transfer in either of these, the Cassette adapter or the (Remarkable!) diskette adapter. Both operate on the same principles. Each assumes a standard "home" position, and one of those makes good sense. The driving of gears/cogs/splines is in no way involved in the transmission of information, at all. This mechanical behavior is only meant to provide users with a representation of their data be it audio, vidio, or textual, to emulate in time what was once done in space to deliver stored information whole. I like questions like this.
The speed would be too little probably
Despite using computers since the mid '90s. I had no idea these things existed! Thanks for demonstrating this unique technology, and showing what the insides look like.
that makes two of us. i never even knew about the cameras.
Although I still have a stack of floppys in my office, I'm blown away at how storage efficient fully functional programs were back then.
I also remember filling an entire floppy with only a few 'high res' images.
_At the time it was better to just print the image after you waited for it to load, and save it to a physical file._
That's peak 1990s (even though the device came out in the early 2000's) Sony right there, you can see and feel the quality and thought that went into this - I almost exclusively put the first money I ever had in Sony devices, a complete Hifi-stack, Tuner, Amp, double-cassettes, MiniDisc and CD player, every portable I ever owned, Walkman, MD-Walkman, Discman... Everything was made to last, sturdy and functional, like this Floppy simulator I never even heard of before - thank you for showing it off (even though I'm 4 years late). Learning something new every day ^^
I'm still a Sony fan to this day. Even though they don't feel quite the same these days. But at least I can go back and enjoy the things I never had then.
I remember seeing these in the shops in the early 2000s, I think I saw one in a clearance bucket a David Jones. I do believe they were quite costly when they were new. Quite an ingenious idea, especially considering that until the early 2000s, nobody had a computer with a card writer in it. These floppy disk adaptors really were a stop cap solution until cheap multiple card writers became commonplace.
This is also from before USB storage was widespread, so a floppy drive might be the only way to easily get data on and off a machine. Really ingenious solution.
There were also PCMCIA Card Readers available at that time. Of course you had to have a notebook which was not uncommon at that time. I had a Toshiba Libretto 70ct which i used in combination with such card reader to store photos from the Digital Camera.
The better argument is that nearly everyone had a 3.5" floppy drive at the time, regardless of whether you had a desktop or a laptop. And you used to be able to buy single disk cases.
So this would have been a fabulous solution for needing a card reader that you could just take with you.
Never heard of it or I certainly would have bought a Mavica at the time. The deal breaker for me was that the 1.44 mb floppy was shrinking fast. Yup, just one of those things that slides by and ya find out about it decades later. Whelp, now i have full reason to get an old Mavica and the fancy floppy.
I actually have some dual mavicas that use a memory stick and floppies. Worked great for handing someone a couple pictures copied over to the floppy
I had a Mavica and I loved it. The floppy drive failed, so I bought a used one on Ebay, but the floppy drive didn't work on that one either. So I bought a GoPro. Although, I mainly just use my phone nowadays.
@@fredashay That's kind of sad. :( If only electronics repair wasn't so uncommon and expensive.
Conversely, I have 4 Mavicas including the FD-88 and the floppy works fine on all of them. It is probably a ticking time bomb but it is cool to take a photo and hear "tick tick tick tick tick"
This video is excellent. I would have also really liked to see the actual repair you did, and you didn't even break a sweat when that tiny little wire broke off.
Thanks for the video. I still periodically use my Sony MVC-FD95 Camera with this MSCA-FD2M Flash Floppy adapter. Sadly they stopped support on newer OS'es to read/write the floppy adapters and never did support Linux which I now run. So today, I simply pull out the flash memory card and insert it into a multi-function card reader to USB adapter and I'm still able to grab the photo's I've taken. It's amazing that this almost 25 year old 2.1 mega-pixel camera still works today. Thanks for taking us on a tour of the insides of these remarkable adapters. :)
I'm pleased you enjoyed this. I have a Sony floppy disk camera but it's broken. So I've not had the pleasure to actually use one yet.
Came across this video and decided to watch it... What a blast from the past! I had all the items you used including the camera. It also used a "superdisk" that was one gb.
I also had a minidisc player/recorder that was a camera that recorded pics to a 1gb minidisc. Thanks for bringing back the memories... :)
Glad you enjoyed this, thank you.
I saw those thin coil wires when you were lifting the board, the suspense was palpable. I imagine the adapter was designed in the age of 8-16MB memory sticks and copying a 60MB file took out the batteries.
Thumbs up for taking it apart
Very neat! I love stuff like this that is fairly irrelevant these days, but had its place in days gone by. That's clever how there are obviously additional communications via the magnetic head to communicate things like the adapter's battery state.
Amazing video! Would be nice to see firmware dump of that atmel controller!
i have to have one of these now! I love all the different types of storage options they have out there!
Cool gadget from the new millenium, I'm glad that you were able to fixing. That teardown was a truly suffer, even just to seeing it
In the late 90s, I want to say 97, I purchased an Epson Photo PC digital camera. It was ahead of its time. It used a memory card of some sort( I think it was called compact flash). It was more square than rectangle. The camera even had a 3x optical zoom. I purchased a 16MB memory card and I could get about 25-30 full res images on it or about 100 low res images. I think the high res was 1600x1200 and the low res was 640x480. I never did own a camera that used floppy disks. But I almost purchased a camcorder that recorded to CD.
I love old tech..
I like how intimate these videos feel, as if I am sitting next to you while you are demonstrating some cool obsolete tech.
So that's how that works! I remember reading about the adapter on the feature sticker on my Mavica and wondered how they would went about it. Neat tech, but at $100, I think I would've just gone with floppies until I could afford a camera with a native card reader.
I get the impression things like this were made for the average consumer rather than the more tech savvy like us that knew how times were changing. But now we can go back and marvel at how it was done :)
Why doesn't this gadget isn't developed anymore. This will be great for retro computing.
There were patent issues for many years and it didn’t get settled in court until as late as 2010!
Good recovery congratulations. I was wondering why no to use a head with a long gap avoiding the need for a driver, but in the end of the video I realized that without the seek time the read/write gets faster.
Loved the Eldon Tyrell reference.
fascinating laptop. looked it up as a potential 98/xp retro gaming rig, 3 hours and $140 for the machine, dock, 256meg memory dimm, 160gb pata hdd, cmos battery, and cardbus wifi module i have my own on the way here.
MP3s directly on a cassette deck.
I have seen it all. That looks awesome.
Oh cool! You 3D printed the "Save Icon"!
Your video was very enlightening, and scary at the same time!
Does the software/camera format the memory stick with a customized file system, or does it leave in FAT/FAT32 and can it be read in a normal memory card reader after it has been used with the floppy disk adapter?
I'm glad you enjoyed the show :) Yes, the camera uses FAT on the memory stick.
With those old Atmel MCUs, you might be able to dump their firmware and inspect it. Would be interesting to see how they did it
My synth keyboard is still using floppy for samples,but this memory stick floppy disk thing itself needs additional drivers to comunicate with the atmel,I guess it's special data streams made for the windows and the drives,not very useful at all.
lol, i recognize that laptop. It's from the R505 series. I collect, restore, refurb, and repair that series as a hobby. i have an R505-DL that's currently in bits, that i'm working on. i have two functional R505-ESPs, in my collection, that i restored, and a few other R505 models in various states of repair. I also have a few docking stations, a PCMCIA CD-ROM drive, and a few other accessories. Really nice little machines, for their time. Nice to see someone using one.
I didn't realize it was to park the heads, shame they couldn't do like a track detection thing! Think its all USB floppies or just that one? Based on the floppy instructions it supports or something.
It's all USB floppy drives that don't work. The driver has to control the controller directly and can't do that over USB.
This needs a comeback!
That audio cassette SD card adapter/music player is pretty cool even if I don't have a need for it anymore. Plus, I always wondered how these weird Memory Stick to floppy adapters worked. Thanks!
The warm fuzzy nostalgia on seeing WinXP again was wonderful!
I will likely never abandon my favourite OS being 98SE, but XP is a close second. Of the many NT incarnations, XP was _by far_ the least aggravating.
We have one of those. Got it for the Mavica mothersnail gave us when she was done with it. Slow as molassas running uphill in January. Was better off using our Mavicas with built-in memory stick capability. Wonder if the SD card version of that adapter would actually work in a Mavica...
I remember my high school was very proud to have purchased a Mavica. They used it to take digital photos at ball games to post up on the school website. I think one disk could hold about a dozen photos or so. I don' t know if they just kept a stack of disks handy, or just took photos sparingly.
Floppy disks were pretty cheap as far as media went. It didn't take long until you had a box of them sitting on your desk.
I had one of these in 2001 iirc, usb sticks were not a thing, CD-R/W was a pain for files you use alot between computers, I was still on dial-up, but every computer still had a floppy drive, so a 32MB floppy disc was very useful!
Wow, I've always understood that these would work kind of like one of those tape adapters, but at the same time I've wondered about the computer aspects of them; how the drive would recognize when it had a medium in it was much higher capacity than it was designed for, and what sort of speed it would run on. I've never really had the opportunity to have one of my own of these with everything that I would need to make it work -- or at least I haven't gotten around to it -- but now this has solved my curiosity! Thanks very much for this video!
As long as the filesystem tells the computer that this "disk" is big, then the computer will just believe it. So that part is not an issue. But since the head is apparently just parked in one spot, I do wonder how the computer communicates to the adapter where it wants to read/write from. That has to happen "out-of-band", which is fine with the computer with the special driver software, but what about the cameras?
@@tylisirn Indeed, reading a single track is easy enough. But when the drive seeks to a next track, the coil should start pulsing the contents of that track.
The same would apply for writes, the drive would want to read the sector address of the correct sector before writing, I suppose.
Finally, 1 terabyte floppy disk is possible!
I’ve never seen a floppy disk camera before I only used film cameras in the 90s I can’t believe I’ve never heard or seen a camera like that before
I've got one of these adapters in a drawer somewhere. Bought it used from eBay ten years ago after I received a top-end Sony Mavica floppy disc camera. I've just never gotten an original Sony Memory Stick to test it with. My original thinking was that the camera can record video, but only 30 seconds worth IIRC, which fills a normal floppy disc. So just get the adapter and you'll be able to record longer clips, right? ... but I'm willing to bet after getting more familiar with the camera that I'd be able to record MORE 30-second clips, but not one single clip that's longer than 30 seconds. The camera seems to buffer the entire clip into onboard memory and then write it out onto the floppy after recording concludes - so 30 seconds is probably still the limit for one recording. Well anyway thanks for saving me from having to take my own adapter apart to see what's inside :)
interesting details, thank you. I have not used mine in a Mavica yet.
I was wondering, if you can do this with magnetic floppy disks, would it be theoretically possible to do the same with CDs? That is, have a dummy CD you can insert into a slot-loading CD player (such as in a car) and play MP3s through that
well entire cd spins so no its not possible
@@Austeja608 There were old caddy style CD drives though and in principle you could make a design that would just let the motor spin the center but would stay in place.
I've pondered that very question for years. Whatever system you came up with would have to allow for optical tracking, have some sort of mechanism that replicated the pits and landings of a CD that could be modulated quickly (perhaps a MEMS device?). It would have to be lightweight, and also balanced to spin without vibrating.
It would be easier make a CD adapter would work only with top loading CD players. The way I imagine it, there would be an optical encoder that is spun by the CD player hub, that's used to provide synchronization info. The rotary encoder would be mechanically isolated from the rest of the adapter. There would DLP chip that would sit over top of the read laser. You would have to manually position the adapter so that the DLP chip was aligned with the laser.
The main problem with this, is that you would need a micromirror device with 0.5 micron sized pixels (1000x smaller than current technology), with a refresh rate of at least 30 kHz (they top out at 240 Hz right now), to be able to reliably fool the read laser into thinking it was a CD.
Another idea would be to construct the adapter so that it intercepts the beam from the laser, and then sends back it's own signal. In essence the adapter functions as a sort of fiber optic channel. This might actually be a more practical approach. The adapter could consist of tiny module that tethered to a fiber optic cable that clips directly onto the read laser carriage. Every time you wanted to use it, you have to delicately insert it into place. The fiber optic cable would connect to the rest of the adapter that would contain the optical engine, and the electronics for the flash memory storage.
what's the dock that you put the laptop in?
MagicGate was Sony's drm of the time. it was on Play Stations as well.
I still have a REALLY cool camera that uses a 3½" floppy disk. I use it occasionally just because I too, love old tech, but cellphones have made taking pictures easy, but so much less... special🤷? Looking through the family photo albums used to be an emotional, nostalgic experience.
The people that invent these could have ruled the world if they tried... But I think this was just more fun!
I got the MSAC-FD2M adapter & a 32MB Memory Stick with my Mavica FD90, and the camera says "Format Error C: 13:01" when I try to use it. The Stick reads in my USB adapter just fine and I tried reformatting it on my computer to no avail, so now, I'm thinking the button cells might be dead. Could that be the case or if there's something else I'm missing?
I did have to replace the button cells in mine, good cells are a must. Also make sure your stick is a non-PRO version and the older the better. I have seen some incompatibilities with older memory sticks working in various old Sony products and not others. Such as my white 64Gb Magic Gate stick only works in some devices for some reason.
@@JanusCycle My Stick is the older-style one; non-PRO and not the Memory Stick Duo. Sony really screwed the pooch with the different versions of Memory Stick IMO. Anyway, I think the button cells might be the problem.
Edit: Yup, new button cells worked. So I can use my Mavica now; the camera did come with a floppy disk, but I need a USB floppy drive to read that.
I've always wanted to know if something like this ever existed, seeing as cassette adapters existed. Floppy drives themselves seem to be built like tanks, it's the disks themselves that's failing. Obviously floppy drive emulators exist and are still made and are obviously the preferred method, but perhaps there's a use case for a flash adapter of the disk itself, like if the drive uses a custom interface. You'd just have to make custom software to work with it of course. And I'm surprised that this isn't limited to 1.44 MB files and requiring bank switching, so this is essentially using the floppy controller to directly access the flash storage in its entirety, which begs the question if floppy controllers could theoretically see far larger disks if such a thing existed and firmware was made for it.
It's kinda weird that floppy controllers were adaptable in this way, yet you can't read Amiga or old Mac format discs in them.
I wish this was still sold, specially with an usb port on it. It sounds silly, but I do love the sound of old floppies+old laptops just won't get use of the floppy image to usb switcher. They need real floppy disks
I also appreciate the sounds of old drives. Modern flash alternatives are convenient for retro computers. But keeping some working with old drives is also good.
I love the design, the aesthetic is just a mixture between analog and digital
6:21 the man know his "Blade Runner" 👏🏿👏🏿👏🏿
Nice blade Runner reference
This. Is simply genius
I have one and it works well on my Digital Mavica. However, I don't have a legacy computer with native floppy disk drive so the image cannot be extracted from it. It seems that the data is not stored into the memory sticks in a memory stick way, but rather some intermediate representation for this very specific adaptor, because my computer cannot read/write the MS if I use a card reader. Can you help verify this? By the way, how did you get a screenshot of the old FlashPath website? I'll make a video about Digital Mavica's this year and I'm collecting some materials.
I don't have a working Mavica to test this. What kind of error or response do you get when trying to read the card?
The FlashPath website is from archive.org Wayback Machine. Since making this video I also found the FlashPath user manual. I would have included it if I had found it earlier.
archive.org/details/generalmanual_000011144/mode/2up
I hope you include something about CD Mavicas in your video.
i cant be 100% Certain, but i think? they were stored in a different format, only used one *Briefly* back in highschool where one of my classes we had gone on a camping trip and had to take turns using between 3 of the later Mavica's (i think it was the FD-88 or FD90 we used i cant recall anymore the exact model and looking up online what those models look like vaugly bring an image to mind) the adapter was used only for the poor sap who wasnt lucky to use the Computer in the class w/ a memory stick reader (though most of the time we just used floppies.)
I still use my MVC-FD91 and I read the memory sticks via a memory stick to USB adapter. I needed to do this as I'm running Linux and SONY never had a driver for using the MVC Floppy adapter as a regular floppy under this OS. I just wanted to say that I have had no problem reading the photo or video files directly off the memory stick via a USB adapter, at least not under Linux (Mint ver 21.1 currently). My little USB adapter is one of those that has all the different memory card supported slots, including the old Sony Memory Stick standard.
One additional side note: I've noticed the adapters need to have fresh batteries. After a time the camera will started giving "Format Error C: 13:01" when using the adapter. A new pair of coin batteries always fixes this problem.
but what is that BU9230A chip is? seems no info over google
@3:26 I had bought one from China on eBay some five years ago. It plugs into USB to charge and put songs on its built in memory rather than having as SD card. I had bought it because my car only had an integrated cassette player. Once the cassette is put in the player it works just like a normal cassette, rewind, fast forward, track search and all worked. The only difference is that it stored endless hours of songs and that messed up the tape counter. I don't think it could record like a cassette would but TB I never tried as the car stereo didn't have a record function.
'I wanna see a negative before I provide you with a positive', sure thing mr Tyrell
The next Mission : Impossible movie should be based around stealing files very slowly from a PC that only has a floppy drive accessible.
2 Minutes into the video I ran to ebay and bought one of these! An Olympus one that uses SD cards. This exactly what I'm looking for. Being able to use an adapter that is pretending to actually look like the thing is amazing. Okay, now to watch the rest of the video! :D
A useful bit of kit in any time travelers tool bag.
Flint lock pistol.
Roman gold coins.
A 1tb floppy disk containing an archive of every newspaper and most of Wikipedia.
Just come across one of these things. The memory stick doesn't seem a very firm fit, I suspect the contacts are out of alignment, so it doesn't seem to work.
Mine seems kinda loose too. But also check your memory stick. These adaptors only work with early non-Pro sticks. Worse case is you can take it apart and check inside. Hopefully not cause the same damage I did :)
@@JanusCycle There's a thin spring, about 18mm long, which I think is part of the switch. Did you have that?
Spring goes under the switch, so the device switches off when out of a floppy drive. Mine still isn't working, seems to be drawing too much current, but interesting to play with.
I don't remember seeing that switch, but it was likely there. I'm sorry yours is not working.
I still remember this in the brochure included in our Sony Hi8 camera
Something like this would've been a must if you had a mavica camera. Should find one and test it on my FD85
You really need to do some audio leveling for the spots that have music, my guy. Other than that, you have some pretty good videos!
Thank you. I do struggle with this for some reason. I believe in part because I'm not considering TH-cam's normalization. I must do better here. I'm glad you are enjoying the videos.
17:11 the flies, where it comes from? i'm curious about that.
The Australian summer
why were these floppy disks sometimes called hard disks for ??
I always learn something from your videos. Cheers bro
I used one of these with a Pinnacle Deko video graphics system on a production truck, the only way to move bigger files back and forth, operating system was Windows NT, so no USB support!
I see Sony has kept most of the annoyances of the old floppy in this model too.
You mentioned that the adapter doesn’t have a write protect hole. I assume that the memory stick has a write protect switch or somesuch.
When memory stick came out I joked that I wanted a reader for them that could address 128 of them and be wall mounted to look like a prop out of Next Generation.
A "floppy disk" which contains removable NVRAM - SD cards or whatever - would be very useful for legacy PCs which require A: drive to boot certain legacy softwares.
Nice Blade Runner reference @ 6:21
what if they made a memory card with the shape of a floppy disc, how much storage would that have then? My interest is maintaining the outward look of old school computers and tech but inside is operating on modern hardware.
You could probably fit a terabyte of flash memory inside a floppy disk. When you insert it into your 'floppy drive' the metal protector slide would open revealing the contact points. Smaller disk sizes would be cheaper and you could have more though. Imagine a disk box with 360Gb flash floppy disks inside would impress your friends :)
This video motivated me to buy one of these adapters :D
Very interesting.
I originally thought that these adapters are just pin-adapters with some pins on the underside. Never thought that this would work with any ordinary PC floppy drive just using different drivers.
Do you know where to get that USB floppy drive? My aim is to obtain disk images that can be read on a Panasonic A1-GT MSX Turbo computer, and I believe it uses floppy disks.
I'm slightly shocked that you pull out a silver Vaio with XP and don't run the silver XP theme
You are right, I missed that possibility right there. But thank you for watching anyway.
@@JanusCycle All good, your videos are amazing and bring me a lot of nostalgic joy. I remember the N900 and Neo Freerunner days well for example and before that I ran Angstrom Linux on a PDA. To me your niche content is highly refreshing.
I've yet to find any proof an MMC version of the FlashPath ever made it to commercial sale or as an OEM product. In the late 90's I worked for a guy who has an Olympus digital camera that used SmartMedia and he had a FlashPath adapter.
An MMC version probably could be physically hacked to work with SD, since SD supports MMC communication modes. MMC will work in an SD slot. I've no idea what the maximum capacity of the MMC FlashPath would be.
That is quite a claim to make. There are a couple of blurry photos of MMC Flashpath adapters in retail packaging. Beyond that I have no idea. Very interesting, thank you.
@@JanusCycle until I see a review of one (vintage or newer) or anything other than vintage advertisements or articles mentioning them, I'll assume the MMC version ended up as vaporware or at least didn't make it past the prototype/sample stage.
Sort of like how so many 1980s microcomputers and game consoles had slots or connectors or other things "for future use" but they were for a future that never arrived.
@5:58 whoa - i didn't realize the transfer rate on floppies was that slow! and i was buying bulk floppies in the hundreds in 1993!
Wouldnt the write protection be dealt with on the memory stick rather than the simulated floppy
That's a good point, because there is a write protect option on both.
Maybe I'm missing something here, but these came out when USB was starting to be fairly ubiquitous on computers and every PC had a serial and parallel port, why jump through the hoops of making a floppy adapter when you could just make a USB/serial card reader that would work just as well, if not better?
I wish my household bought more Sony stuff than just a PS1 back in the day, this would've been awesome paired with a good Mavica. Way more convenient than packing around a full size card adapter dongle.
Thanks for the video
I have a working Sony mavica floppy digital camera that works great
How can I tell if it supports this adapter ?
The camera works with floppy disks fine
Most Mavicas from 1999 onwards work with this adapter. For example the FD73 and FD85 from 1999 do work.
Search for your model with the adapter model number MSAC-FD2M
@@JanusCycle k thanks I have Sony Mavica MVC-FD88
@@JanusCycle The price for this adapter on ebay is expensive though
The buy it now ones are expensive. Look for the ones that are auctioned, much cheaper.
Neat. I've always wondered about how this thing worked. Thanks!
thank you for your sacrifice
couldn't they have put the read write head coil vertically instead of horizontally to avoid the head reader problem?
It is not necessary, since track 0 is the one that contains all the index and structure of the disk, what is done is to trick the device so that all the information is in track 0 and it is not necessary to go looking for more tracks.
There's a bug in your video at 17:11.
Oh wait-
...It's a fly.
Nice video BTW. Great save with that wire.
Welcome to the Australian summer experience
@@JanusCycle Fairly used to that, Brazil here - and we're also "upside-down", lol.
Its a little neat Device. I own the original Flash Patch for the (awful) Smart Media Card and the Sony Adapter. It's really a shame that you need a real Floppy Controller so that Adapters work.
Know if the memory card have sdcard or micro, if like a slip into floppy size to appear like floppy(so actually more files can be inside)? A fake floppy? To use on computer that looks very newbie even? If a disc can be many sizes, if a tiny disc as a fake memory card(sdcard)(but actually still readable)? Because the point of reading a disc is spin, if as a cassette(cassette spin create spin for tiny disc in the cassette)? A cassette that is to have alot of tiny disc.
Oh, I miss that floppy thing. This sound of motor, this green square diod and this sound when it read data from that. I used to come to my school mate with pack of 20 floppies and copy archived games with winzip in multi volume archives. Sometimes they do not open properly, so I had to come again and copy damaged volumes once again.
This is interesting item. But this is not a floppy simulator, this is a some sort of adapter, which using floppy as data transfer. But it is an interesting device. Never saw something like that.
I can’t find this online anywhere
Have a look on eBay for 'Sony FD2M'. There can be quite a range of prices. Don't forget you will also need and early non-pro memory stick.
There are SD card adapters for this format so you could go into the GBs no ? Dual SD card adapter.
Unfortunately that's not possible. This 'floppy disk' only works with non 'Pro' versions of Sony memory sticks which only go up to 128Mb. Those cool dual SD card adaptors are made to work with Pro memory stick devices only. I wish it were possible, but early Sony devices from the 1990s only work with early memory sticks.
I wonder if one could use a 256 partitioned into 2 128s. The moment I thought that, you brought out the 256 with a toggle.
On second thought; how would one partition a stick if the machine doesn't recognize the entire 256 and would the machine recognize both partitions?
A full 256MB stick wouldn't be detected. Sony changed their interface protocols after the early 128MB sticks. That's why these dual bank 128MB sticks became popular. That was the only way early devices could kinda go over 128MB.
What are gears for in the cassette adapter? They don't seem to do much? Provide resistance for the player for some reason?
Rotate the other wheel of the cassette.If it doesn't spin, the player will shut off, as it thinks the end of tape was reached.
I still don't understand why there is no PCMCIA SRAM memory card emulator using SD cards when even emulating floppy disc is possible.
Do you really mean SRAM, which was only used at the time of the Amiga 600 (=30 years ago)?
For flash memory, these adapters did exist - I got one for SD (max 2GB) to plug into CompactFlash, which fits into PCMCIA using a mechanical adapter, as both are ISA-based. People used them to plug SD cards into their CF-based cameras.
But I don't remember ever seeing one updated for SDHC/SDXC --> PC Card (PCI-based), though, you can find cardreaders for SDXC->Express-Card/34 (PCIexpress-based).
Thanks for the look inside. :)
You are welcome :)
What's the point if you need a driver to use it!?
I saw this thing 20 years ago. When I really want to buy this as a momento, I couldn't find it any more.
What’s the difference between the fd1 and the fd2m version of the adapter?
The user manuals are basically the same for both. Maybe because the fd2m came with software for Windows NT and Mac OS they gave it a new model number,
@@JanusCycle thanks!
I don't like the fact that the memory stick ejects out of the adapter just as you're ejecting the floppy stick. Couldn't the memory stick have come in from the side?