I can't imagine they sold too many of them. They actually sold the memory stick USB adapter for PC use for $10 less, so I'm guessing they really wanted you to use the floppy adapter in the camera itself. Still it only supports around 3 of the Mavica models which is unfortunate.
@@DOSStorm Reminds me of my old internal LS-120 drive, which hooked up as an IDE device. It was only ever really used as a normal high-density floppy disk drive, but it was a BLAZING FAST normal floppy disk drive, and I miss it every time I need to do something with a floppy disk today.
It might be a bit more interesting in that regard if it worked without the need for special drivers. I don't think it even has drivers that work in real DOS. Besides that it is pretty damn slow. lol
Same concept as a cassette to 8-Track adapter or aux/CD to cassette adapter. Would be surprised if there wasn't a file size limitation in line with the floppy drive's normal capacity. Considering LS-120 existed the capacity wasn't groundbreaking. The LS-240 actually exceeds the capacity while retaining the floppy disk format.I wonder if this converter would read/write faster in one of those drives since they were floppy compatible but had faster transfer speeds for their higher capacity media? This media conversion was helpful for those who bought floppy-based devices wanting to avoid the format war and cost associated with flash memory but then wanted to keep using the camera after it was apparent that 1.44MB was not sufficient for the way digital photography changed photography from an occasional thing where you might spend weeks or months to fill up a 12-24 shot roll of film to where you would potentially take dozens of pictures at a single event. Thanks to the near zero cost and lack of the need to buy rolls of film and pay for development which often took 24 hours or more. The ability to instantly have photos rather than collecting up months of film rolls for a trip to have them developed fundamentally changed how we use cameras so it was understandable how the thought process that went into buying a first digital camera made Floppies look very attractive at the time and the hardware cost would have made a converter like this an attracttive way to save that investment once the realities of digital photography set in.
That is a good way of explaining it. It does seem like its a sort of retrofit in the same vein as a cassette adapter or something. I do wonder if you can get better speeds off a Sony double speed drive, or the camera itself since some Mavicas have faster floppy drives. This was definitely a cool adapter, but I think it was made obsolete pretty quickly once USB became more common.
the way these worked was very similar to how CDROM implemented SCSI over ATA via ATAPI, they used a couple of fixed sectors as a packet interface to write commands and read/write buffers, hence the need for a special format utility as a regular floppy drive format would try to format as though it were a standard disk. as it is basically just a packet interface you could technically support any storage device, one thing i'd like to see FlashFloppy implement is a similar interface using out of bounds sectors to permit the host machine to change disk, create new disks, change drive characteristics, etc all in band rather than the god awful serial/i2c hacks that get proposed.
Nobody seems to know about this thing. lol I found it in a pile of stuff at work with some Sony Handycam documentation and I couldn't resist playing around with it.
I recall these(and the similar FlashPath adapters, which were also made for non-Sony memory cards) to be less about replacing floppy disks with memory cards and more about providing a "convenient" card reader that didn't need to take over one of your RS-232 ports. I was disappointed when I learned they required drivers, but it DID answer my question of "how the heck does this simulate a floppy disk?"(It doesn't. Sad face.)
I would imagine it had to have been pretty amazing to use on the compatible Mavicas. You could hold a ton of pictures with 128MBs compared to using a bunch of regular floppies. Not a cheap solution for the day though.
I found mine in a pile of old stuff at work. They do show up on ebay from time to time but the pricing varies wildly. Another thing to note is the Mavica MVC-FD200 has a separate memory stick interface built in. It might be more worth your while to just get one of those instead of the adapter.
Looks like the last driver was for XP, and you can still download it on Sony's website. Kind of a shame there is no DOS driver otherwise it could potentially be useful on REALLY old machines.
"Mmmm-Sac-Fuh-Duh-To-Ummm". Finally! Someone who can properly pronounce model numbers!
Its the only proper pronunciation!
Cool! I heard of the Mavica floppy camera but this floppy-to-flash adapter was new to me.
I can't imagine they sold too many of them. They actually sold the memory stick USB adapter for PC use for $10 less, so I'm guessing they really wanted you to use the floppy adapter in the camera itself. Still it only supports around 3 of the Mavica models which is unfortunate.
They did make internal zip drives that fit in a floppy sized case slot I always wanted one as a kid but never got one before the format was gone.
Yep, they made internal drives that fit in 3.5" bays. They are actually much faster than the parallel versions.
@@DOSStorm Reminds me of my old internal LS-120 drive, which hooked up as an IDE device. It was only ever really used as a normal high-density floppy disk drive, but it was a BLAZING FAST normal floppy disk drive, and I miss it every time I need to do something with a floppy disk today.
I love this from the data migration standpoint. Imagine using something like this to transfer important files to a newer computer/medium.
It might be a bit more interesting in that regard if it worked without the need for special drivers. I don't think it even has drivers that work in real DOS. Besides that it is pretty damn slow. lol
@@DOSStorm Ah. Well, they also have floppy to USB drives.
Same concept as a cassette to 8-Track adapter or aux/CD to cassette adapter. Would be surprised if there wasn't a file size limitation in line with the floppy drive's normal capacity. Considering LS-120 existed the capacity wasn't groundbreaking. The LS-240 actually exceeds the capacity while retaining the floppy disk format.I wonder if this converter would read/write faster in one of those drives since they were floppy compatible but had faster transfer speeds for their higher capacity media?
This media conversion was helpful for those who bought floppy-based devices wanting to avoid the format war and cost associated with flash memory but then wanted to keep using the camera after it was apparent that 1.44MB was not sufficient for the way digital photography changed photography from an occasional thing where you might spend weeks or months to fill up a 12-24 shot roll of film to where you would potentially take dozens of pictures at a single event. Thanks to the near zero cost and lack of the need to buy rolls of film and pay for development which often took 24 hours or more. The ability to instantly have photos rather than collecting up months of film rolls for a trip to have them developed fundamentally changed how we use cameras so it was understandable how the thought process that went into buying a first digital camera made Floppies look very attractive at the time and the hardware cost would have made a converter like this an attracttive way to save that investment once the realities of digital photography set in.
That is a good way of explaining it. It does seem like its a sort of retrofit in the same vein as a cassette adapter or something. I do wonder if you can get better speeds off a Sony double speed drive, or the camera itself since some Mavicas have faster floppy drives. This was definitely a cool adapter, but I think it was made obsolete pretty quickly once USB became more common.
Yeah. It was definitely only really useful for limited scenarios. Still a neat bit of kit though.@@DOSStorm
the way these worked was very similar to how CDROM implemented SCSI over ATA via ATAPI, they used a couple of fixed sectors as a packet interface to write commands and read/write buffers, hence the need for a special format utility as a regular floppy drive format would try to format as though it were a standard disk.
as it is basically just a packet interface you could technically support any storage device, one thing i'd like to see FlashFloppy implement is a similar interface using out of bounds sectors to permit the host machine to change disk, create new disks, change drive characteristics, etc all in band rather than the god awful serial/i2c hacks that get proposed.
Haha "hooked on phonics" had me thinking of House of Pain. Cool video, didn't know about this thing.
Nobody seems to know about this thing. lol I found it in a pile of stuff at work with some Sony Handycam documentation and I couldn't resist playing around with it.
@@DOSStorm it does make more sense as a stick adaptor to read from mavica cameras, interesting workaround if nothing else.
I recall these(and the similar FlashPath adapters, which were also made for non-Sony memory cards) to be less about replacing floppy disks with memory cards and more about providing a "convenient" card reader that didn't need to take over one of your RS-232 ports.
I was disappointed when I learned they required drivers, but it DID answer my question of "how the heck does this simulate a floppy disk?"(It doesn't. Sad face.)
I would imagine it had to have been pretty amazing to use on the compatible Mavicas. You could hold a ton of pictures with 128MBs compared to using a bunch of regular floppies. Not a cheap solution for the day though.
how can I get one of these? they all seem really expensive. I love mavica's, but carrying a billion disks can be annoying sometimes
I found mine in a pile of old stuff at work. They do show up on ebay from time to time but the pricing varies wildly. Another thing to note is the Mavica MVC-FD200 has a separate memory stick interface built in. It might be more worth your while to just get one of those instead of the adapter.
I had (maybe still have) one of these. Were any official or unofficial drivers for newer Win/Mac/other released?
Looks like the last driver was for XP, and you can still download it on Sony's website. Kind of a shame there is no DOS driver otherwise it could potentially be useful on REALLY old machines.
Can you possibly make an ISO file from this driver CD-ROM? Unfortunately I can't find mine anywhere anymore.
Looks like someone else has already uploaded it to archive.org. archive.org/details/driversmsacfd2m
@@DOSStorm Just tested, still works perfectly (after replacing the batteries). :) Thx!
Love the name.. UHMSAC FADOETOEHM
Gotta pronounce your model names correctly! lol
Okay, so this won't work on older hardware even if it can read a 3.5" floppy.
If it can run at least Windows 95 and has a floppy drive it will work. There doesn't appear to be a DOS driver unfortunately.
@@DOSStorm I mean, at this point, I'd be better served with a gotek and all that
@@KingMob4313 Yeah exactly, I wouldn't go out of your way to buy one. I got this one for free.
MMMM sack! 😂
got me to LOL
Moar of dis pls
Will do!