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

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.

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 😸

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

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.

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"

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 :)

There were patent issues for many years and it didn’t get settled in court until as late as 2010!

Glad you enjoyed this, thank you.

I'm glad you enjoyed the show :) Yes, the camera uses FAT on the memory stick.

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 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.

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.

interesting details, thank you. I have not used mine in a Mavica yet.

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.

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.

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.

Thank you. I do struggle with this for some reason. I believe in part because I'm not considering KZfaq's normalization. I must do better here. I'm glad you are enjoying the videos.

Welcome to the Australian summer experience

@@JanusCycle Fairly used to that, Brazil here - and we're also "upside-down", lol.

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 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.

Nothing like the feeling of spotting a must have item :)

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.

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.

The limited uses means they were never too popular.

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.