Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)

bbrudgers 3 days ago 15 commentsRead Article on edn.com

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Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

kstrauser•about 1 hour ago

This makes me realize I haven't had to mess with a Memory Stick in many years. Ye gods, I'm glad the younguns never had to deal with Sony's obsession with proprietary tech. They made the loveliest hardware, hamstrung with single-source accessories that cost many times more than the standard version but were only just a little better, if at all.

Today you can more or less buy an SD card and stick it in something and have it work. I am glad we eventually won this war.

mghackerlady•about 1 hour ago

I think memory stick was fine for what it was. When they entered that market, there really was no true winner and sony doesn't like to gamble on things like that. It had wide support across sony and non sony things alike, so it wasn't like they were useless.

The real egregious one was the PS Vitas memory cards. Good god were those ever a scam

tjoff•about 1 hour ago

Yeah, that sucked. But we still have Apple, sigh.

kstrauser•2 minutes ago

I disagree with that. Apple was one of the first to jump on standardized media. They were using SCSI back in the day, and Ethernet, and USB, and Firewire, and SD cards, etc. etc. etc. Their own hardware is proprietary. They are/were a hardware company. But I'm looking at the MacBook on my desk and none of the things connected to it are Apple branded or single-source standards.

EvanAnderson•about 4 hours ago

My first digital camera used Smartmedia. I had a 32MB card, if memory serves. I could pull pictures off via a serial interface, which was slow and required a proprietary app, or via a FlashPath[0] adapter. Sadly, FlashPath adapters require a driver and aren't actually emulating a floppy diskette. Putting the reader into a floppy diskette shell and using the disk interface to transfer data is still a pretty cool hack, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FlashPath

dan_sbl•about 1 hour ago

My first MP3 player used it as well. I remember how much this memory card style felt like a 5¼ floppy disk, as opposed to most other formats at the time which were hard shell.

reaperducer•about 4 hours ago

Putting the reader into a floppy diskette shell and using the disk interface to transfer data is still a pretty cool hack, though.

Sony made a Memory Stick adapter like this, too. I imagined that one day someone could back up their computer to a Memory Stick.

(Alas, still a dream, as the Transcend JetDrive Lites for MacBook Pros are as unreliable as they are slow. Never put data on a JetDrive Lite that you want to last more than a couple of days because you never know when it might just suddenly stop responding for no reason.)

elevation•about 3 hours ago

> Never put data on a JetDrive Lite that you want to last more than a couple of days

Even floppies were like this towards the end. You could buy media at any store, but quality of the magnetic substrate must have been very low. By the time school labs phased them out, best practice was to save your work to two or three diskettes because the deterioration was so quick.

mghackerlady•about 2 hours ago

I really like SmartMedia cards. They aren't really practical anymore, but they look cool. The small sizes kinda allow it to be used as a kind of solid state floppy, where you really only store one thing on it

happycube•about 5 hours ago

Ah, the 2000's, when CompactFlash cards weren't that compact, and SmartMedia wasn't at all smart.

brudgers•3 days ago

Pdf of Smartmedia Card spec.

https://affon.narod.ru/CARDS/elec10ei.pdf

Because 5v Smartmedia cards are rare and I have a Roland MC505 that can use them, I am wondering if it is possible to create a hardware emulator using an Arduino.

throw-the-towel•about 1 hour ago

Oh man, narod.ru brings back a lot of memories. (It kinda was the Russian Geocities, with all the small sites and insane design that implies.)

happycube•about 4 hours ago

RP2350. 5v tolerant IO if set up correctly, enough GPIO's and the PIO's to trigger everything at once, and more than enough speed to emulate flash.

Smart(sic)Media is just a NAND flash interface really.

1970-01-01•about 5 hours ago

Before anyone asks, it was cell phones going stratospheric in popularity, with T-flash (sdcard) storage that won the flash format war (excusing USB obviously). Everything else was left to rot.

giantrobot•about 1 hour ago

SmartMedia was a pain in the ass because the 5v and 3.3v cards weren't immediately obvious. You could spend a lot of money on a card only to have it physically fit but not work in a device or reader.

With CompactFlash and MMC (and SD) if they physically fit they generally worked.