Simulated floppy disk with real magnetic data transfer

An adapter that turns a flash based memory format into a floppy disk. The adapter simulates the magnetic signal that a floppy drive expects to see. This adapter was invented by SmartDisk and popularized by Sony for their range of floppy disk digital cameras. This enabled Sony's late model floppy disk based digital cameras to also use memory sticks. The principal used is the same as popular cassette tape adapters, but instead with a digital magnetic signal. A teardown of the adapter results in damage to the internals and concludes with a repair attempt.

Sony 64MB MemoryStick

FlashPath - An Interim Solution

Sony MSAC-FD2M Floppy Disk Adaptor for Memory Stick

Music: DJ TR!P
Song: Janus Cycle (Cyba)
Song: Janus Cycle (Control)

[propcor]

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

[operator]

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.

[sleora]

Why doesn't anyone do the same thing today but with SD cards? It would be a big hit with retro computing enthusiasts.

[greenaum]

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.

[radiolabworks]

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. :)

[PBgaming]

"I want to see a negative before I provide you with a positive" Nice Bladerunner quote there man!

[zeekjones]

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._

[hitmiccs]

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 ^^

[imranahmad]

3:00 there's a cool little trick you can do with a cassette player, if you get an in ear headphone and put it next to the magnetic head while play is pressed the cassette player will play the audio out of the player from the headphone, this also works with in ear bluetooth head phones, only drawback is no stereo separation.

[Lachlant]

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.

[SireSquish]

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.

[JuanesChiwirosky]

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

[fwingebritson]

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.

[joen]

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... :)

[JfromUK_]

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.

[Jdivanchik]

я за свою жизнь разного повидал, но чтоб флопики в цифровых камерах использовать, такое вижу впервые 😂

[philross]

it is not a floppy omg it was called 3.5 memory card, a floppy was a similar one the was well paper it was floppy because of the weight for memory storage metal on one side that is how it got it's name floppy, hold it side ways then it slop down hence floppy or wave it to flop true fact I grew up during that time

[enosunim]

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.

[chezsnailez]

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...

[frankthespank]

I caught that Blade Runner “Voight-Kampff Test” quote you threw in here 🤓