who doesn't?! it shows that if you have a will and resources there is a way, inspirational. and kids these days throw hands up if the package manager doesn't have a library to do the thing they want, nay, they need to do for them at their job.
At that time LS120 (120MiB/126MB) drives were available (internal and external). They were also compatible with regular floppies, as long as they had a standard 720/1440K format.
These disks had a bit of a different use case back then. There were quite a few digital cameras that only supported floppy’s. With a firmware update, they’d be made compatible with this flash floppy devices. Those were awesome back then! :D
Correct I bought a second hand Mavica that uses floppy disks. The camera had the Sony branded version of this product that uses memory stick and not smart card. I wonder who created it first? The Sony disk looks awfully similar (same battery configuration etc).
For Win3.x probably you need win32s to be installed on the OS. It was typical to have win32s executables to be recognized as DOS 16bit ordinary programs by original Win3.x binary image loader that was expecting to find either 16bit Windows or DOS executable. Installing win32s extender updates windows 3.x kernel and program loader to support 32bit windows executables and in case your drivers were created/backported to Win3.x well into the 9x era chances are high they require win32s to be used.
I remember, my company at the time used these. It was a choice between these or parallel port compact flash readers. We were running Windows NT 4.0 which didn’t support USB. These flashpath disks were easy to use and just worked.
That could have made the distribution of programs so much easier in the pre-CD-ROM days, but it was probably invented long after CD-ROMs became common.
I think 1998 was the first version, but as someone else said cdnrom at that time was ok for read but writers were still rare, so would still have been useful
I thought about something like that. Taking a floppy, but making a modern, bigger version with flash memory. In the end I just making a floppy disk that doubles as USB drive. Now the usability of that Flash Path depends on how stuff is saved. If it's just a regular FAT formatted drive that can be mounted anywhere else or if it's doing some magic with virtual drives like a gotek drive.
Fun fact: I have from the same company a variation of this SmartDisk that will accept an old-school SIM card and present it's contents to an accompanying application. Very useful for bulk editing and import/export of SIM contacts as phones back in the day had alphanumeric keypads which made editing quite a chore!
Maan I feel old, I was watching this video and my niece aSKED how were you able to hold and insert the save icon in this video. Also great video showcasing this piece of hardware.
there was an MMC version that is harder to find. I think there might have been a SD card one as well but I have not seen it. it is hard to search for since Sandisk also released smartmedia flashpath disks.
I had one which I used with my Fuji DX-10 camera, but all my Smart media cards stopped working, so it got put in a drawer and left. It still should be around somewhere. I had it working with Linux and Windows 95/98. I did also use it for information exchange a couple of times, but I remember it being quite slow.
Wow, I didn't know this even existed. I've used some interesting, now forgetten tech from the day like LS120's and even MD's. But this just made me wonder. I'm a computer technician, working and servicing hardware, since the late 90's and something like this blows me away each time.
It's weird how large the flash cards are. But I still preferred my Panasonic LS120 camera. 120MB on a floppy, and it could handle traditional disks, while also acting as a USB floppy drive. And for it's time it had an excellent zoom lens.
Thank you for bringing back memories. Never heard of Flash path before but it would have been nice to have very large capacity FDD. This would have saved me from getting the Zip drives.
2880K floppies existed, but saw basically no use outside of Japan. And then there were 1680K DMF floppies. (with 21 sectors per track) PC DOS 7 and OS/2 Warp 3 also support XDF formatting for 1860K And apparently LS-240 drives could put 32 MB onto regular floppies with some SMR magic.
That's pretty neat, I never knew there was a more generic form of these kind of adapters. I have a Sony version of this which works with their proprietary memory stick format, and had a similar primary use with getting images onto the computer from digital cameras.
I knew about the Sony version, also a versiin that supports mmc. I need to get a mavica to see if the smart media one is supported with sony cameras, I susoect not.
I do have one that is similar from Sony I had received from a friend. It's the Sony Memory Stick/Floppy Disk Adaptor MSAC-FD2M. I have yet to try it out, but it works just like the one in the video. Uses two CR2016 button batteries, and a slot to plug in a Sony Memory Stick.
I could see this being useful for needing to install operating systems from flopping on retro computers that don't have USB, CDROMs or have rare/picky drivers (Sony Vaio laptops, for example). Something like this could move a lot more data than a traditional floppy.
@@FingerinUrDaughter Not all laptops have serial ports, again, thinking of Sony Vaio. Laptops like those had proprietary multi-ports with breakout boxes in order to save space on the laptop. Most of them are missing these days.
Again, mini usb first became available later and didn't help the millions of digital cameras and mp3 players with no usb support. Your need to remember this thing came out in 1998, the things you're talking about gained traction a few years later. As stated in the video the primary users of this were digital photographers, no one said this thing is a fast way of transfering data, later there were faster transfer methods, there always are. Its a curio, your either interested in old tech or your not.
@@soviut303 youre not talking about modern laptops. no modern laptop would have any use for this, and old ass win 95/98 or earlier laptops arent doing shit to save space, and most have a serial port.
I didn't know this existed, but I thought of basically the same idea a while back... thinking about cassette adapters for CD/MP3 players, I wondered if it would be possible to make an adapter to read/write an SD card in a floppy drive. The potential for an updated version of this kind of floppy adapter that uses SD cards instead of those other memory cards would be huge for retrocomputing... no one would need to hack Gotek USB stick floppy emulators into their computers, they could use their original floppy drives.
Flash Path adapters were also available for the Sony Memory Stick - It was the only way you could really access them on computers without USB (And worked out faster than downloading images through a serial port) - and I have a PhotoFast dual mSD to MS-Duo adaptor which will accept 2x 32GB SD cards for a total of 64GB. 💾 I wonder how Win95 might react to encountering a „floppy“ with 59,4GiB of capacity in it?... 😁
Interesting! I wonder if this could work with a Sony Mavica camera that used floppies as their memory storage, but given that you had to install the special drivers to read the disk in your PC I'd assume not. What kind of transfer speeds would you get with this, and how would that compare to the old pre-USB serial connections that the oldest digital cameras used?
Since the optimal 3.5 inch diskette data rate transfer speed is 500kbps, it would be faster than the fastest RS232 serial port data transfer speed (14kbps) but slower than Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP - 1Mbps). That's why entry-level scanners (non-SCSI) used parallel ports instead of serial before USB being adopted.
That would be cool. I should have been more organised and done some benching. Might be a project for the future and bench against early usb , zip drives etc.
Sony made one of these for Mavica cameras: Sony Floppy Disc Adaptor For Memory Stick MSAC-FD2M. Two batteries as well. th-cam.com/video/dhGl30Ll4vA/w-d-xo.html
Sony had own adapter MSAC-FD2M which uses full size memory stick. However it only utilizes one side hence write speed is twice low than writing on regular floppy.
Thankyou, it was probably obsolete as dedicated pc storage on launch but now for retro stuff its just a handy thing to grab from the floppy box. I'll definately be installing the driver on all ky machines.
I was confused at first that this would need drivers, until I saw that it just appears as a single giant 128MB drive. I was hoping this was a device that let you put images of 720KB or 1.44MB floppies on the card and then it can load them like a virtual floppy disk in any device with a standard floppy drive, rather than basically be a direct flash adapter that requires specific software to work.
So Inguess these woukd have beenngood for rio owners. I did read that somewhere and looked to see if I could get one but those early rios that use sm cards seem pretty rare now !
What an interesting piece of retro technology - I wonder how it works, like physically - maybe it does it sort of like those radio cassette adapters? Or maybe the driver takes over the disk drive entirely under some custom protocol, idk
I've only ever seen the floppy emulator drives with the SD slot directly in the drive. Curious how this disk interfaces with the drive head. From the video it almost looks like there is a disk like material in the square opening, but that can't be right because how would that interface with the SD card? I love oddware. Cheers!
It's interesting. In the square it's just a bit of plastic continued from the molding. There dont appear to be any obviouse points of contact. Somenkind of magnetic signal from inside the plastic to the heads?
@@66mhzbrain That's a much better guess than I would have. Must convert digital to a magnetic signal that the heads pick up on. Perhaps like those old cassette to audio cable adapters to connect a cell phone to an older car stereo before Bluetooth and USB became prevalent.
@@66mhzbrain I'm sure the photo folks that work with this sort of thing have talked about it online somewhere. If you do end up finding out the technical how-it-works, perhaps that would make an interesting video. Cheers.
I used to have a Sony Mavica Digital Camera, Model MVC-FD200? or close to it , it still used a standard floppy, (it did also take 2.88 MB ones as well, but I came across one of these cards in a bargain bin one day, I think I paid around $22 USD for the same 128 kind. I later took the camera apart & disconnected the cable that ran to the motor, & it saved hours of the camera battery's life per charge, close to 3hrs or so (not having to spin the motor to write to disk) but let me save tons more pics & was fast enough to use it's gif-2-vid type feature to record video to it. Also reminds me of Imation's drives & "zip disks" too. The one disadvantage these had was it drains one of the button cells faster than the other, so I needed to swap them into the other one's compartment to drain them evenly. (Took the floppy adapter apart too- one battery powers the actual memory interface & chipset that communicates with the read/writer part & the other battery powers the actual data transfer to the flashcard itself, and yes it still worked like normal after putting it back together)
Cool, others have asked about this. I need a mavica to try. I was just talking to a dude about card voltages and I'm guessing 3v cards always draw from one 3v battery and 5v cards use both with a resistor, but 5v was ditched early on so maybe that 2nd battery didnt do much?
Like you said that probably does depend on the card, that said- all flash storage is just a newer version of the TF- card format. The memory, memory interface, & storage controller are faster; but still use that same format. If they kept the voltage the same instead of it being 5v, the 5v card would just draw more amperage to make up for it, & they probably wouldn't have needed the resistor either because the power would probably go to run the cards memory interface first, they don't usually have issues with over-voltage (unless they can't dissapate the heat well) but if they don't have enough voltage your likely to get ram storage issues or data corruption. Apparently there is also a style of mavica that used Sony's minidisc format, used with Sony's, Sharp's, & Technic's minidisk recorders/players. (interestingly it's also the same format used inside the old Sony PSP Game & Movie disc cartridges- each one holds 1.4 Gigabytes (1,400Megabytes) in data storage. Compared to the US's 1.7 Gigs (1,700Megabytes) on a 5 inch DVD. Wish I would have known that back then, I could have used the minidiscs I already owned & that would have given me 10 times the storage of this flash card, & probably for cheaper. (it wasusually around $28.00 for a 5 pack, x 1.4GB each = roughly 7 Gigs of storage- minus a bit for formatting. (I still own 2 minidisc systems. One recorder & one portable player.)@@66mhzbrain
A better more useful option for retro pc's is the LS 120, an 120Mb floppy disk released in 1997. I had one and loved it. Later they increased it to 240 Mb !
The primary purpose for this was fast tranfer off a memory card, it wasnt really trying to be a super floppy though it could be. Last time I looked ls120 drives are now rare and expensive.
Very nice, did you ever try out the LS120 Super Disk Drives ? I know they had versions for both MAC and PC, also had an IDE interface version. The drives could read/write standard 720k + 1.44MB and the 120MB Diskettes.
@@66mhzbrain The LS-240 version wasn't ever sold in the USA, might have been Japan only. But it had a cool trick up its sleeve. It could put 32 megabytes onto a standard 1.44M floppy. However it didn't support random write/delete to such disks. Everything going onto the disk had to be prepared and written at once like a CD-R, and the 32 meg disks could only be read in an LS-240 drive.
The same way a cassette that you'd put into a cassette player that would have an aux cable that you could plug into an MP3 player to play MP3s over an analogue car radio would convert digital signals into magnetic tape signals, you could also have chips on board this floppy disc make magnetic "noise" that software would then be able to interpret as 1s and 0s
@@nukfauxsho ah cool, not sure. I just looked and see 5v lower capacity ones. It would make sense then that the 2x cr2016s are there to give 6v. Some way of sensing an either uses 1 for 3v or 2 stacked with some resistance for 5 perhaps. I'll get a 5v and try.
It's laughable now that they have MMC cards and slots on standard units, but back in the day (before USB devices were standard or even added to the system), this was really something. I wonder if they had disk compression ala DosDoubler or DoubleSpace for it? Seeing that this is a solid state drive, you might have to put up with extensive reads and writes, but not thrashing. I wonder if it was worth it to go 256MB or close to it?
Yes its similar to the kind of things the likes of stacker did where you compressed the floppy and put the driver on the disk to use on other machines.
I scored one of these a few years ago, however finding it needed a driver kind of killed it for me, I was kind of hoping it would allow the mounting of disk image files, but no. So since I cannot boot from it I tossed it into the 'for another day' pile. I did wonder about sending it to a retro computer TH-camr, however if there are plenty out there, probably pointless.
I would have loved to see the transfer rate on that device. Imagine being able to take all of your Windows 95 floppy disks and put them on to one. I could take my entire dos games library and fit them onto one floppy.
If this didn't need drivers this would've been perfect for any machine on any OS that only had floppy disc support for external media. Even if there was a CD drive on the computer, floppies could be rewritten while CDs generally weren't.
in 90s we had FDDs with capacity of 1.44 MB, and this 128 mb is supposed to be an improvement? Besides bits are not divisible, you cannot have mili bits.
People here have said yes, there was firmware and it worked. Though it may have only beennthe sony memory stick version. Im half tempted to get a mavica just to see if this one works
I'm guessing the format type (not fat, maybe some digital camera standard) and that the stream of data from a spinning disk is different from howerver this reads, so hence the driver. I think it knows somethings in the drive mechanically and you can even attempt to format through windows, though it fails.
It needs to align the read head with the transfer head on the flash path and bypass any seek instructions that would reposition the drive head. The normal driver is going to do the normal floppy seek.
The 3.1 installer was probably meant to be run using DOS. It looks like it drops down to DOS and comes back. EDIT: You're going to hate this even more. The drivers were probably DOS compatible and you didn't even need Windows.
Definately not dos, I did try but didnt show because the drivers were win 3/95. Some have said you need win32 extensions and then it should work. I'll mess around with it some more.
@66mhzbrain85 Yes not many people had digital cameras at all, I think I was the only one in the factory I worked at that had one. They even paid me to bring it in and take pictures of processes.
I never thought to check this time round, others have mentioned it too. I'll probably do another vid in the near future and maybe bench against early usb, floppy, zip drives etc.
Never knew this existed, does it worl a bit like the fake cassette for a car stereo, emulating a diskette by coils? Quite amazing. If only it were powered from the spinning of the motor instead of requiring batteries 😂
It is. Looking to get the other versions. Someone here said the sony memory stick version would take an sd adapter so who knows what size it might got up to😁
Es la primera vez que veo un adaptador asi ahora me hubiera gustrado que se viera la velocidad de transferencia al copiar un archivo desde el pc al adaptador y porque no pasar un video y ver como funciona
It's solid state, it has no moving parts (apart from the sliders that lock the disk into the drive and reads/writes off the memory card. How it gets the data off the memory card🤔 who knows🤷♂️ guessing something inside talks to the read/write heads of the floppy drive somehow.
I love odd functional tech like this.
Me too, its a cool thing!
who doesn't?! it shows that if you have a will and resources there is a way, inspirational. and kids these days throw hands up if the package manager doesn't have a library to do the thing they want, nay, they need to do for them at their job.
@@66mhzbraini have a dell thats stuck on os load in progress and it wont boot to anything
My just woke up eyes read an entirely different f word in that sentence.
@Xsiondu haha, what?
that time 1 floppy is 1.44MB so this one holding 128MB that's feels like having 30TB right now, dude what a great feeling having it that time.
Yes, If I'd known about these in 1998 it would have seemed like magic!
At that time LS120 (120MiB/126MB) drives were available (internal and external). They were also compatible with regular floppies, as long as they had a standard 720/1440K format.
Yes but that didnt help the primary market for digital photography, though I think a couple of panasonic cameras used ls120.
@@66mhzbrain Yeah, Panasonic had a camera that used LS120. It's bulky, but it shoots well for the time.
I had a zip disc, which felt like the future. 100mb of power.
These disks had a bit of a different use case back then. There were quite a few digital cameras that only supported floppy’s. With a firmware update, they’d be made compatible with this flash floppy devices. Those were awesome back then! :D
Cool. Someone else was asking about that, sony mavica with firmware?
@@66mhzbrain Some Mavica cameras supported the Memory Stick version of the FlashPath.
Yeah my school newspaper had one, the mavica I think. All I remember is that it couldn't save that many pictures.
Correct I bought a second hand Mavica that uses floppy disks. The camera had the Sony branded version of this product that uses memory stick and not smart card. I wonder who created it first? The Sony disk looks awfully similar (same battery configuration etc).
@@trevorhart4120maybe it's actually the same product made in cooperation with different branding.
For Win3.x probably you need win32s to be installed on the OS. It was typical to have win32s executables to be recognized as DOS 16bit ordinary programs by original Win3.x binary image loader that was expecting to find either 16bit Windows or DOS executable. Installing win32s extender updates windows 3.x kernel and program loader to support 32bit windows executables and in case your drivers were created/backported to Win3.x well into the 9x era chances are high they require win32s to be used.
Cool, thanks for the info, I'll give it a try
And the good thing, once you have the driver installed, you'd save on all those driver floppies because you can use the big drive :D
I remember, my company at the time used these. It was a choice between these or parallel port compact flash readers. We were running Windows NT 4.0 which didn’t support USB. These flashpath disks were easy to use and just worked.
Yes they seem simple and straight forward and from the reviews I found, reliable
Actually there is unofficial USB support for Windows NT 4.0 ;)
when did that come out?@@intel386DX
@@66mhzbrain I guess early 2000's
Great video! I love these little 'in-between worlds' type of devices. Something to bridge the gap between floppies and USB proliferation.
not robocop I am so disappointed I wanted robocop.🤣🤣🤣
I wish it was robocop😁
Thankyou , yes me too, there were some wierd and innovative ways round things back then😁
I wonder what kind of hackery the driver was doing to allow the OS to use this.
It probably align the sending head with the reading head of the floppy drive so there is always constant bond between the two.
It would be fun to find out. Its pretty clever though!
That could have made the distribution of programs so much easier in the pre-CD-ROM days, but it was probably invented long after CD-ROMs became common.
I think 1998 was the first version, but as someone else said cdnrom at that time was ok for read but writers were still rare, so would still have been useful
I thought about something like that. Taking a floppy, but making a modern, bigger version with flash memory. In the end I just making a floppy disk that doubles as USB drive.
Now the usability of that Flash Path depends on how stuff is saved. If it's just a regular FAT formatted drive that can be mounted anywhere else or if it's doing some magic with virtual drives like a gotek drive.
Fun fact: I have from the same company a variation of this SmartDisk that will accept an old-school SIM card and present it's contents to an accompanying application.
Very useful for bulk editing and import/export of SIM contacts as phones back in the day had alphanumeric keypads which made editing quite a chore!
Cool, makes sense that they coukd do that without much effort!
smart media card, what a lovely format it was. I loved how thin it was compared to all other card formats of that era
Yes, first time I've seen one and they are quite elegant, feel sturdy enough and nice to handle, not clunky and chunky. Like slightly bigger sd cards.
Maan I feel old, I was watching this video and my niece aSKED how were you able to hold and insert the save icon in this video. Also great video showcasing this piece of hardware.
Thankyou! Haha, I know what you mean😁
I had one of those to read the flash media from my Fuji MX1500 I got in 2000...still got the camera
Cool, I remember getring excited when the first cams came out, not even 1mp. Wish I'd kept my first.
there was an MMC version that is harder to find. I think there might have been a SD card one as well but I have not seen it. it is hard to search for since Sandisk also released smartmedia flashpath disks.
Cool, would be nice to track down some of the othera!
I have a couple of these. -Much better than the smart card versions since MMC’s are considerably cheaper and easier to find.
@@davidp4456 cool, I plan to seek out some of the other versions if I can find them
I had one which I used with my Fuji DX-10 camera, but all my Smart media cards stopped working, so it got put in a drawer and left. It still should be around somewhere.
I had it working with Linux and Windows 95/98. I did also use it for information exchange a couple of times, but I remember it being quite slow.
I think the main thing was it was a lot faster with a card full of photos than moving them across a cable.from a camera.
I used one of these to pull pictures from my first few digital camera's memory cards and it just worked.
Yes it seems simple and just does what its supposed to!
I remember trying to transfer Q3test from my schools computer back in the day; of course one of the floppies failed. Really could have used this lol
Haha, someone else has said, avoiding disk fails is a good use for these. And all you need is a teeny box to keep your cards in!
Wow, I didn't know this even existed. I've used some interesting, now forgetten tech from the day like LS120's and even MD's. But this just made me wonder. I'm a computer technician, working and servicing hardware, since the late 90's and something like this blows me away each time.
Yes its cool, all sorts of funky ideas to get around things back then!
It's weird how large the flash cards are. But I still preferred my Panasonic LS120 camera. 120MB on a floppy, and it could handle traditional disks, while also acting as a USB floppy drive. And for it's time it had an excellent zoom lens.
Ls-120 is pretty rare and expensive now though😔
Thank you for bringing back memories. Never heard of Flash path before but it would have been nice to have very large capacity FDD. This would have saved me from getting the Zip drives.
Thank you for watching. Yes, a lot less clunky than the zip
2880K floppies existed, but saw basically no use outside of Japan.
And then there were 1680K DMF floppies. (with 21 sectors per track)
PC DOS 7 and OS/2 Warp 3 also support XDF formatting for 1860K
And apparently LS-240 drives could put 32 MB onto regular floppies with some SMR magic.
This video's title is something I had no idea existed and I immediately needed to know about
Haha cool, first time for everything (as far as mybtitles go) 😁 thankyou for watching
That's pretty neat, I never knew there was a more generic form of these kind of adapters. I have a Sony version of this which works with their proprietary memory stick format, and had a similar primary use with getting images onto the computer from digital cameras.
I knew about the Sony version, also a versiin that supports mmc. I need to get a mavica to see if the smart media one is supported with sony cameras, I susoect not.
I remember in elementary school they had a digital camera that you put a floppy disk into. It was a big deal.
Sony mavica?
@@WhoLover It was sony! All the computers there were macs too
@@itstheweirdguy the best thing is, I'm too young to remember floppy disks being used anywhere, lol. I just am a retro tech nerd
Everyone should be a retro tech nerd!
... a bit bumpy like most of the 90s tech. thanks for this video of that great oddity
Thankyou for watching😁
What a weird little thing! I'd have been SO PUMPED to have something like this back then! Kinda want one NOW.. 😄
Haha, yes its wierd and cool. I would have loved one back in the day😁
I do have one that is similar from Sony I had received from a friend. It's the Sony Memory Stick/Floppy Disk Adaptor MSAC-FD2M. I have yet to try it out, but it works just like the one in the video. Uses two CR2016 button batteries, and a slot to plug in a Sony Memory Stick.
Cool, I read thatbthey dis a version for the memory stick. I'll have to try and track down the other formats
I could see this being useful for needing to install operating systems from flopping on retro computers that don't have USB, CDROMs or have rare/picky drivers (Sony Vaio laptops, for example). Something like this could move a lot more data than a traditional floppy.
its outright useless because they made USB and serial port adapters that dont drop the read/write speed down to the level of a floppy drive.
@@FingerinUrDaughter Not all laptops have serial ports, again, thinking of Sony Vaio. Laptops like those had proprietary multi-ports with breakout boxes in order to save space on the laptop. Most of them are missing these days.
Again, mini usb first became available later and didn't help the millions of digital cameras and mp3 players with no usb support. Your need to remember this thing came out in 1998, the things you're talking about gained traction a few years later. As stated in the video the primary users of this were digital photographers, no one said this thing is a fast way of transfering data, later there were faster transfer methods, there always are. Its a curio, your either interested in old tech or your not.
It would be jon bootable but I imaging you can format as bootable and make a file dump pre 95, I will experiment
@@soviut303 youre not talking about modern laptops. no modern laptop would have any use for this, and old ass win 95/98 or earlier laptops arent doing shit to save space, and most have a serial port.
I wonder if there could have been a way to generate enough power while the drive was spinning to supply power to the flash memory
Yes someone mentioned some kind of dynamo type thing. I guess miniturization would be an issue back then, would have been very cool
I didn't know this existed, but I thought of basically the same idea a while back... thinking about cassette adapters for CD/MP3 players, I wondered if it would be possible to make an adapter to read/write an SD card in a floppy drive. The potential for an updated version of this kind of floppy adapter that uses SD cards instead of those other memory cards would be huge for retrocomputing... no one would need to hack Gotek USB stick floppy emulators into their computers, they could use their original floppy drives.
That sounds like a great idea for a maker type project. Or a version that works in dos with 720k drives where usb and cds might not be right.
That’s a cool idea
You can still buy external floppy drives for modern computers that connect through USB @arnoldrimmer4833
@arnoldrimmer4833 that would be mad, like loading programs by casette on an 8 bit
Flash Path adapters were also available for the Sony Memory Stick - It was the only way you could really access them on computers without USB (And worked out faster than downloading images through a serial port) - and I have a PhotoFast dual mSD to MS-Duo adaptor which will accept 2x 32GB SD cards for a total of 64GB. 💾
I wonder how Win95 might react to encountering a „floppy“ with 59,4GiB of capacity in it?... 😁
Very cool, haha it would be fun trying it out😁
I love all tech that tricks interfaces
Yes it's cool, however it does it!
Love the keyboard!
Tha pc keyboard? Its a nice mechanical one I got, Chocony
Interesting! I wonder if this could work with a Sony Mavica camera that used floppies as their memory storage, but given that you had to install the special drivers to read the disk in your PC I'd assume not. What kind of transfer speeds would you get with this, and how would that compare to the old pre-USB serial connections that the oldest digital cameras used?
Since the optimal 3.5 inch diskette data rate transfer speed is 500kbps, it would be faster than the fastest RS232 serial port data transfer speed (14kbps) but slower than Enhanced Parallel Port (EPP - 1Mbps). That's why entry-level scanners (non-SCSI) used parallel ports instead of serial before USB being adopted.
That would be cool. I should have been more organised and done some benching. Might be a project for the future and bench against early usb , zip drives etc.
Sony made one of these for Mavica cameras: Sony Floppy Disc Adaptor For Memory Stick MSAC-FD2M. Two batteries as well. th-cam.com/video/dhGl30Ll4vA/w-d-xo.html
Yes, Sony marketed a version that read Memory Sticks for use in later Mavica models. One came with an FD85 I got off eBay.
Sony had own adapter MSAC-FD2M which uses full size memory stick. However it only utilizes one side hence write speed is twice low than writing on regular floppy.
I actually have one of those! We used them with one of the first olympus digital cameras.
Cool, I saw Olympus must have licensed it as some of them are badged with the Camedia logo!
Awesome video as always. Never heard of it, but as you say, it has lots of potential for older machines.
Thankyou, it was probably obsolete as dedicated pc storage on launch but now for retro stuff its just a handy thing to grab from the floppy box. I'll definately be installing the driver on all ky machines.
I wonder if this would work in the Sony digital camera that used floppy disc.
Others have wondered about that, someone mentioned that they did and the driver side was handled with a camera firmware update, so maybe!
I was confused at first that this would need drivers, until I saw that it just appears as a single giant 128MB drive. I was hoping this was a device that let you put images of 720KB or 1.44MB floppies on the card and then it can load them like a virtual floppy disk in any device with a standard floppy drive, rather than basically be a direct flash adapter that requires specific software to work.
Yes that woukd have been perfect and super handy for retro stuff today
Sony aparently made one to adapt to memory stick. There are memory stick to microSD adapters. The question is, can you have a 1TB floppy?
I'd kill for a TB floppy
I'd love to try that
Do they make BIOS-level drivers for this thing? It would be really great to be able to boot something like Minix from a single floppy.
No but it would be very cool to make it bootable!
Amazing ! i love this!
Me too!
my rio pmp used one of those memory cards. it use parallel port to transfer, now that was painfull
So Inguess these woukd have beenngood for rio owners. I did read that somewhere and looked to see if I could get one but those early rios that use sm cards seem pretty rare now !
Great idea for retro-gaming
Yes, a fun thing to mess about with
How can it be solid state AND floppy at the same time?!
Because its not really a floppy, as described in the video!
It would be pretty cool if this device would work with the Sony Mavica line of cameras.
Quite a few people have said they do, with the memory stick version as long as you have the right firmware
What an interesting piece of retro technology - I wonder how it works, like physically - maybe it does it sort of like those radio cassette adapters? Or maybe the driver takes over the disk drive entirely under some custom protocol, idk
Many are asking the same, it's clever however they do it!
I've only ever seen the floppy emulator drives with the SD slot directly in the drive. Curious how this disk interfaces with the drive head. From the video it almost looks like there is a disk like material in the square opening, but that can't be right because how would that interface with the SD card? I love oddware. Cheers!
It's interesting. In the square it's just a bit of plastic continued from the molding. There dont appear to be any obviouse points of contact. Somenkind of magnetic signal from inside the plastic to the heads?
@@66mhzbrain That's a much better guess than I would have. Must convert digital to a magnetic signal that the heads pick up on. Perhaps like those old cassette to audio cable adapters to connect a cell phone to an older car stereo before Bluetooth and USB became prevalent.
Sounds like maybe, I need to see if I can find a review somehwere that explains it now or I wont sleep tonight😁
@@66mhzbrain I'm sure the photo folks that work with this sort of thing have talked about it online somewhere. If you do end up finding out the technical how-it-works, perhaps that would make an interesting video. Cheers.
Never heard of that back in the day.
Me neither.
Interesting video, like!
Its a mad thing!
Nice old tech might have to try one thanks for the video
Thqnks for watching, they're fun things to mess around with!
I just wonder if you could dump all thouse floppys on 128 MB and install all of it from one sorce
I would think so, i will try when i get a sec
I used to have a Sony Mavica Digital Camera, Model MVC-FD200? or close to it , it still used a standard floppy, (it did also take 2.88 MB ones as well, but I came across one of these cards in a bargain bin one day, I think I paid around $22 USD for the same 128 kind. I later took the camera apart & disconnected the cable that ran to the motor, & it saved hours of the camera battery's life per charge, close to 3hrs or so (not having to spin the motor to write to disk) but let me save tons more pics & was fast enough to use it's gif-2-vid type feature to record video to it. Also reminds me of Imation's drives & "zip disks" too. The one disadvantage these had was it drains one of the button cells faster than the other, so I needed to swap them into the other one's compartment to drain them evenly. (Took the floppy adapter apart too- one battery powers the actual memory interface & chipset that communicates with the read/writer part & the other battery powers the actual data transfer to the flashcard itself, and yes it still worked like normal after putting it back together)
Cool, others have asked about this. I need a mavica to try. I was just talking to a dude about card voltages and I'm guessing 3v cards always draw from one 3v battery and 5v cards use both with a resistor, but 5v was ditched early on so maybe that 2nd battery didnt do much?
Like you said that probably does depend on the card, that said- all flash storage is just a newer version of the TF- card format. The memory, memory interface, & storage controller are faster; but still use that same format. If they kept the voltage the same instead of it being 5v, the 5v card would just draw more amperage to make up for it, & they probably wouldn't have needed the resistor either because the power would probably go to run the cards memory interface first, they don't usually have issues with over-voltage (unless they can't dissapate the heat well) but if they don't have enough voltage your likely to get ram storage issues or data corruption.
Apparently there is also a style of mavica that used Sony's minidisc format, used with Sony's, Sharp's, & Technic's minidisk recorders/players. (interestingly it's also the same format used inside the old Sony PSP Game & Movie disc cartridges- each one holds 1.4 Gigabytes (1,400Megabytes) in data storage. Compared to the US's 1.7 Gigs (1,700Megabytes) on a 5 inch DVD.
Wish I would have known that back then, I could have used the minidiscs I already owned & that would have given me 10 times the storage of this flash card, & probably for cheaper. (it wasusually around $28.00 for a 5 pack, x 1.4GB each = roughly 7 Gigs of storage- minus a bit for formatting.
(I still own 2 minidisc systems. One recorder & one portable player.)@@66mhzbrain
@elvendragonhammer5433 cool, I will definately invest in a mavica to try. I've seen mavica disc cams they look pretty cool!
A better more useful option for retro pc's is the LS 120, an 120Mb floppy disk released in 1997. I had one and loved it. Later they increased it to 240 Mb !
The primary purpose for this was fast tranfer off a memory card, it wasnt really trying to be a super floppy though it could be. Last time I looked ls120 drives are now rare and expensive.
Very interesting!
Very nice, did you ever try out the LS120 Super Disk Drives ?
I know they had versions for both MAC and PC, also had an IDE interface version.
The drives could read/write standard 720k + 1.44MB and the 120MB Diskettes.
Many failed Zipp disk formats, nobody cares about it now.....
No, never used one but always wanted to get hold of some of the other super floppy formats. Would be cool to find one and do a compare
@@66mhzbrain The LS-240 version wasn't ever sold in the USA, might have been Japan only. But it had a cool trick up its sleeve. It could put 32 megabytes onto a standard 1.44M floppy. However it didn't support random write/delete to such disks. Everything going onto the disk had to be prepared and written at once like a CD-R, and the 32 meg disks could only be read in an LS-240 drive.
@@greggv8 Since this was hardware compression, could you possibly make an LS-240 out of a regular floppy drive by increasing the read rate?
I neednto get some😁
I had the exact same olympus camera!
Cool, its a nice thing. Unfortunately this one works off mains but not batteries. Contacts are corroded so hopeful a good clean will sort it.
I think I actually had one of these. I used it to transfer MP3s to my Rio mp3 player.
Yes I read the early rios used smart media, would have been super handy for those
What? 😮 This is unique find, which usually made into Techmoan or LGR or techtangent videos.
Haha, they would have probabaly done a better job 🤔, they are actully not that rare
Succesfully nerdsniped them 😂
😁
This would've been a big competitor to Zip drives.
Yes, much less clunky
Wait, i thought flopys spined its magnetic disck inside so that way the pc could read it, like in a cd, so how does this work?
The same way a cassette that you'd put into a cassette player that would have an aux cable that you could plug into an MP3 player to play MP3s over an analogue car radio would convert digital signals into magnetic tape signals, you could also have chips on board this floppy disc make magnetic "noise" that software would then be able to interpret as 1s and 0s
many disk formats in floppy disks
Not sure exactly how they do it🤔
How does flashpath handle different card voltages?
Not sure the 3 I have, 4,8 and 128 all seem to be 3v so I assumed all smart media were.
@@66mhzbrain Many older cards are 5V and some cameras were only compatible with one or the other.
@@nukfauxsho ah cool, not sure. I just looked and see 5v lower capacity ones. It would make sense then that the 2x cr2016s are there to give 6v. Some way of sensing an either uses 1 for 3v or 2 stacked with some resistance for 5 perhaps. I'll get a 5v and try.
It's laughable now that they have MMC cards and slots on standard units, but back in the day (before USB devices were standard or even added to the system), this was really something. I wonder if they had disk compression ala DosDoubler or DoubleSpace for it? Seeing that this is a solid state drive, you might have to put up with extensive reads and writes, but not thrashing. I wonder if it was worth it to go 256MB or close to it?
Yes its similar to the kind of things the likes of stacker did where you compressed the floppy and put the driver on the disk to use on other machines.
So would it be possible to make this but USBC and have like a select switch for like 6 floppy’s in 1?
Would be cool
What is its actual transfer speed like? My bet is its going to be identical to a normal floppy, minus seek times?
I didnt bench but I plan to, maybe comparento floppy, zip and early usb
nice DELL GX100 i used one for a few years. was a great stepping stone until i got my first gigahertz+ machine
Yes its a nice well built thing?
Sony did somthimg similar to this but for their Memory Sticks, makes me wonder if someone ever did something similar to this but for SD cards.
Someone mentioned that the Sony memory stick version could maybe take an adapter and then an sd!
I need this!
I scored one of these a few years ago, however finding it needed a driver kind of killed it for me, I was kind of hoping it would allow the mounting of disk image files, but no. So since I cannot boot from it I tossed it into the 'for another day' pile. I did wonder about sending it to a retro computer TH-camr, however if there are plenty out there, probably pointless.
Yes it wouldn't work for booting ornit could be a retro game changer
its mind boggling that the same size i think is now 1 tb and above
I am still surprised noone created anything like this to emulate PCMCIA SRAM cards.
That would be cool
I would have loved to see the transfer rate on that device. Imagine being able to take all of your Windows 95 floppy disks and put them on to one.
I could take my entire dos games library and fit them onto one floppy.
A few people have said that. I wish I had benched it now. I'll probabaly revisit it and bench it against floppy, usb and zip etc.
Can you somehow make it work with Famicom Disk System?
I doubt it, though there may well be someone clever enough to make something somewhere.
If this didn't need drivers this would've been perfect for any machine on any OS that only had floppy disc support for external media. Even if there was a CD drive on the computer, floppies could be rewritten while CDs generally weren't.
Yes good point, It's a shamenit doesnt work with earlier formats
in 90s we had FDDs with capacity of 1.44 MB, and this 128 mb is supposed to be an improvement? Besides bits are not divisible, you cannot have mili bits.
Ah I see the title, they are capitals now.
Man where was that when I was like 10 years old I could have put the Whole Comanche game on it instead of the 32 Floppies I had to use.
Haha, yes😁
What's the max capacity can this support? In particular if you used adapters?
A good question, smart media is super thin so jot sure if adapters exist, I'll be looking to see.
I wonder if this would be applicable for those darn Sony Mavicas. Would've been nice to utilize 128MB's instead of multiple 1.44MB floppies
People here have said yes, there was firmware and it worked. Though it may have only beennthe sony memory stick version. Im half tempted to get a mavica just to see if this one works
@@66mhzbrain If I saw physical proof of this theory working, I would definitely be interested in adding some Mavicas to my arsenal.
Damn, SuperDisk had nothing on this.
Consequently they should power it with a dynamo on the disk spindle instead of batteries :)
That would have been a cool steampunk kind of thing
I don't get why it needs a driver.
It emulates a floppy (albeit a high capacity one) so why doesn't Windows recognize there's something in the drive?
I'm guessing the format type (not fat, maybe some digital camera standard) and that the stream of data from a spinning disk is different from howerver this reads, so hence the driver. I think it knows somethings in the drive mechanically and you can even attempt to format through windows, though it fails.
It needs to align the read head with the transfer head on the flash path and bypass any seek instructions that would reposition the drive head. The normal driver is going to do the normal floppy seek.
It doesn't emulate a floppy. In order read a particular piece of data the computer must send command to it, using a write operation.
Could use one and Commodore 1581 drivers
my megagotchita v2 machine made by orion kft in ungarn was has been ising the 128 gb folppy drivses... now i am no longer
Great video! Subscribed!
Thankyou 😁
The 3.1 installer was probably meant to be run using DOS. It looks like it drops down to DOS and comes back.
EDIT: You're going to hate this even more. The drivers were probably DOS compatible and you didn't even need Windows.
Definately not dos, I did try but didnt show because the drivers were win 3/95. Some have said you need win32 extensions and then it should work. I'll mess around with it some more.
I used one of these with my first digital camera!
Cool, I guess that's how most were used, probbaly why they weren't better known by pc users back in the day
@66mhzbrain85 Yes not many people had digital cameras at all, I think I was the only one in the factory I worked at that had one. They even paid me to bring it in and take pictures of processes.
@@junkmauler haha, the beginnings of a brave new world !
you likely need win32s for windows 3.1 as most things that were backported to win3 required it
Yes cool, someone mentiined this, ill givenit a go
Very cool.
Heh. I've still got my FlashPath, which I think I bought in 1997 or 1998.
Cool, I wish I'd saved some. of my stuff from back in the day.
What are the transfer speeds like?
#1 question as well
I never thought to check this time round, others have mentioned it too. I'll probably do another vid in the near future and maybe bench against early usb, floppy, zip drives etc.
Never knew this existed, does it worl a bit like the fake cassette for a car stereo, emulating a diskette by coils? Quite amazing. If only it were powered from the spinning of the motor instead of requiring batteries 😂
I guess so, many here have suggested the same, its a funky thing!
Thats quite a cool little thing
It is. Looking to get the other versions. Someone here said the sony memory stick version would take an sd adapter so who knows what size it might got up to😁
Were getting to a really weird place in technology.
Japan should adopt this now that they’re done with 1.44mb ones.
Could you imagine Sheldon's enemy list if he had this thing 😂
Haha
@@66mhzbrain Bazinga !
did you breboot the p90 after installing the drivers?
Some gave BIOS support, some offerted it OEM.
users only used CD Roms, all Zipp systems failed.....
@@lucasrem windows 3.x needs a reboot after driver install, whole machine if dos drivers are installed
I did, probabaly just cut that bit out the driver installer always prompts for a reeboot straight after it finishes.
@@66mhzbrain it may be worth trying a different drive. maybe even a 720kb drive if you have one.
Looks cool and it may can fit unpacked hdi files
Yes its a funky thing!
I had one of these.
Cool, theyre useful things!
Omg it need driver , fun fact i got new computer and it will not find lan drivers on win 10 install ,
Nothing ever changes!
Now think , if i was a normi , you can't install win 11 home in offline by default ,
Es la primera vez que veo un adaptador asi ahora me hubiera gustrado que se viera la velocidad de transferencia al copiar un archivo desde el pc al adaptador y porque no pasar un video y ver como funciona
Yes cool, others have said the same. I will do a vid benching it against zip, floppy and usb soon
pretty cool
This so awesome
I'm confused. Is it solid state or floppy?
It's solid state, it has no moving parts (apart from the sliders that lock the disk into the drive and reads/writes off the memory card. How it gets the data off the memory card🤔 who knows🤷♂️ guessing something inside talks to the read/write heads of the floppy drive somehow.