Today I don’t actually have a data storage medium rather a very odd adapter which takes a full size Sony Memory Stick and converts it to floppy for people with a Sony Mavica floppy disk (not the ones with the analog video floppies that had 50 fields/frames of video) camera or for people that have a floppy drive but couldn’t afford a proper Sony Memory Stick reader back then, the usual name was FlashPath as they released adapters for 3 other memory cards and a card that was similar to a payment card, the memory cards were SmartMedia and MMC with the 3rd being the chip card, Sony simply rebranded the adapter for their own use and would lock out other FlashPath adapters using other memory cards besides Memory Stick to capitalize on their proprietary format.
It works similarly to an AUX to cassette adapter for your car but with some more electronics in it to be able to convert the signals on the Sony Memory Stick to something a floppy drive can understand and not reject, on the computer side, there is a driver that needs to be installed to be able to use the adapter as the magnetic coils are only in one place so the heads have to be kept in place to prevent seeking and confusion and to be able to understand the very strange signal coming off the floppy drive (don’t know the specifics but it might be a non standard signal rather than the signal produced by a standard magnetic floppy disk).
I haven’t been able to get the adapter working with the only drivers available on Archive.org, using drivers for other adapters is a no go as the driver will try to detect the disk to see if it’s the one it’s expecting to see, I already had issues with installing the drivers as the installer complained about a dual processor system even though I did not have one (presumably because it was dual core (AMD Athlon x64) and the installer treated it as a dual processor system) so I went into the installer files and set the installer to accept dual processor systems by changing the setting from “NO” to “YES” which worked and installed the software, formatting the memory stick worked but trying to use it resulted in an error, watching some videos showed a thing in the bottom right corner to lock the heads but it wasn’t present in my installation for some reason and after every boot would complain about some monitor application not working and closing itself.
Thank you for reading this Friday‘s post and I hope you have a great day, if you have any queries, thoughts about the format, additional information or to point out a mistake, please put them in the comments :)
Link to previous post, post 12 (29th week): My data storage mediums, post 14 (33rd week) : r/DataHoarder
Link to future post, (To be posted)
MSAC-FD2M Sony Memory Stick adapter on my wall with a small part of a regular floppy disk visible
Another angle with more of that normal floppy disk visible
Sony Memory Stick adapter with a Sony Memory Stick inside
The back of the Sony Memory Stick adapter, you can see the spaces for 2 batteries, a hollowed out space for the spindle so it doesn’t interfere with the drive’s operations and the space where the coil is at (the other side is just filled with plastic)
The Sony Memory Stick that I was using and that the adapter takes
