Documenting Sony Memory Stick | Hacker News Reader

Documenting Sony Memory Stick

dmitry.gr

216 pointselvis7045 comments

Somewhat related anecdote - my dad bought one of the first "proper" digital cameras of its day, the Sony CyberShot F707. Even now, looking back at the quality of the pictures taken with it, it's still mighty impressive(well, it was reflected in the price tag too, but I digress).

The camera used memory stick format, and my dad shelled out for the ridiculously expensive 128MB card to go with the camera, which was great.....except that even that stupidly expensive memory stick could only hold about 50 pictures. But......we quickly discovered some setting on the camera which made it store something like 500 pictures on the card instead! Brilliant! And they still look the same on the display, so no harm done, right?

Well, cue to our first family holiday with it, and coming back only to discover that pictures taken in 640x480 resolution really don't cut it. That was a very.....sad lesson to learn about resolutions and digital cameras.

I remember much later we bought a 256MB memory stick that was basically two 128MB sticks in one - it had a physical switch between "side" A and B.

Compared to a typical 27 frame film that was still an improvement. Plus you could preview the photos and delete shots that didn’t come out, while a film camera was literally a black box until you developed the film.

Yes but in the words of my dad - you could buy extra roll of film literally anywhere, for not a whole lot of money. When you were on holiday with only that one 50-photo large memory stick, and no way to empty it before going home, that's a big problem.

I remember being in Bangkok in mid 2000s on vacation and walking the streets looking for a store to burn a CD with our pictures/video so we could delete the memory stick and use it for more pictures (forget what format it was, might or might not have been Sony). I think we found a shop that did it pretty quickly.

The memory cards had such small capacity, were so expensive, and general backup options were so few that I have maybe low hundreds items of digital photos from the era before 2010-2015. For a long time the best backup strategy had been 4.4GB DVD, oftentimes the memory card was erased without any backup. Since then I've been storing almost every digital photo.

Okay, but to be fair I immediately recognised the "ready" signal 0xAA or 0x55 as "oh, it just toggles the bit every clock. That sounds oddly useful. You can probably sync a clock or something on that." I've also run into situations where I'm counting bits and the flip-flop doesn't actually get set until the /next/ clock pulse, so having the phase change bit arrive one cycle early seems like a kludge around that sort of thing.

Ya gotta remember that Sony is hardware people so they do inscrutable things in software that probably turn out to make silicon implementation easier.

Fun, but somewhat obscure, fact is that Intel MDS systems (their "Big blue box" for developing software of their microprocessors) used 0x55 (ASCII 'U') to set the initial baud rate. When you turned them on they would read signal coming in on the console line, derive timing information from it and then set the baud rate and print out the greeting message.

Using 0x55 to synchronize baud rate is fairly common. E.g. by coincidence just yesterday I was working with the ESP bootloader. The initialization sequence contains a SYNCH command with a bunch of 0x55s the processor uses to determine the baud rate.

There should be a "Glossary of Common Byte Patterns" :)

I just remembered that I saw a list of magic numbers on rachelbythebay.com once and submitted it at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30733067

Maybe you like that. 0x55 and 0xAA are also in there.

Sometimes called a barker code. You can have them start with large clock periods and then speed up so that the receiver is ready at the correct clock rate by the time the data is available in the transmission.

Pure coincidence that 0xAA55 marks the end of the PC master boot record?

I hated how proprietary it was but I always though the physical form factor of Memory Stick was perfect. It was long enough to actually write something legible on a label, which also made it harder drop and lose.

Micro SD is almost ludicrously small and completely un-label-able.

Sony was always pretty good at the ergonomics of physical formats, actually. MiniDisc is such a wonderful format to use.

Yeah, Sony was always pretty good at the ergonomics, but I decided long ago against buying anything they make because they always wanted to go it alone and define their own formats, and refused to join in with other manufacturers to create a common, interoperable standard. E.g. Memory Stick, MiniDisc, etc.

Sony gear always seems high enough quality, but the proprietary lock-in that it inevitably comes with, one way or another, is a nonstarter for me. I haven't bought anything they make in decades.

MiniDisc was decently interoperable as Panasonic, Sharp or JVC licensed it.

The main flaws I think were the price outside of Japan (tarrifs?), and how bad the digital interface was. And there was no other choice than Sony’s junk software running on specific versions of windows to read/transfer tracks from a computer. Which is pretty much the path Apple chose with iTunes/iMusic.

Speaking about the digital interface, there's some music industry skulduggery involved with that. It goes all the way back to when the RIAA decided they were going to ratfuck Digital Audio Tape. While the labels weren't successful at outright killing consumer digital recording, they were able to kneecap it with SCMS, and they basically boycotted DAT so you couldn't buy any legal music for it.

When Minidisc came around Sony had "learned their lesson", so to speak, and just outright bought a music label. While this sounds like the player manufacturers "won" over the copyright owners; the reality is that the opposite happened. When you buy a business, you tend to inherit the business's problems; unless you specifically decide to just run that business as a subsidy for your other business units. That rarely happens[0], it's not like Sony was going to make music for free so that they could sell more players.

So when Sony decided to add a way to copy MP3s to Minidisc, they decided to kneecap it in the worst manner possible, because at that point they had become the music label that they had once fought against. The whole industry was very opposed to unencrypted music and tried to make MP3 players illegal[1]. I imagine at one point when designing NetMD, someone from the Sony Music side of the business just outright dictated to the MD engineers how the system was going to work.

Apple is an interesting case because they were very much willing to ride the wave of music piracy[2] to sell computers, but only to a point. The limit was that their portable devices weren't going to let you copy music - that's why you had to "sync" MP3s to iPods instead of just copying them to the filesystem, and the transfer was only one way[3] unless they were iTunes purchases you owned. This is probably the only reason they were even allowed to license music for the iTunes store, as the labels were otherwise demanding ridiculously consumer-hostile DRM systems nobody wanted.

[0] Counterexample: Google buying On2 and having them make all their patent-royalty-free video standards also Free Software. If they hadn't done this, we would be stuck with VP3/Ogg Theora, and MPEG-LA probably would have killed the $0 licensing rate for free Internet video on H.264.

[1] See RIAA v. Diamond. The Audio Home Recording Act that had kneecapped DAT was still in force; but the judge decided it didn't apply to MP3 players because they didn't record digital audio. This is why you don't hear about AHRA or SCMS anymore.

[2] Remember "Rip, Mix, Burn"? Or, for that matter, that one time Steve Jobs went up on stage at MacWorld and showed off a PlayStation emulator for Macs?

Yes, I know CD ripping and emulators are not piracy, but they're integral components in a piracy workflow. Apple today is the company that refuses to allow iDOS 2 or UTM, specifically citing the fact that emulators allow "content without licensing". Their words, not mine.

[3] Technically speaking you could just copy them off the iPod, but the filenames were all mangled up, and you'd have to reconstruct them from the ID3 tags.

Thanks, it’s very insightful.

On NetMD, the funniest thing was that high end devices still accepted analog 3.5mm input for recording, and it was more reliable sometimes to run an audio cable from the computer, record on device and cut/rename the tracks afterwards than to transfer by USB (or it was the only choice in the early mac days). The only downside was the fixed compression rate.

This! I too appreciated that you could label them. I've been tempted to 3D print "cartridges" that hold a microSD for this exact reason. Hard to lose, easy to move around and label.

They make CF size cases for SD and microSD.

What did you label your Memory Sticks? They were expensive, did you not re-use them?

Sony Memory Sticks, at least the early light purple ones, had a recess rubbing the length of them where you could affix a sticky label. Some even came with a little plastic case and a set of labels.

I bought a pile of transparent, clamshell (full size) SD card cases. I label those, and keep my microSD cards in them.

I used to do embedded firmware, we actually had micro sdcard labels. The other thing I did was keep mine on a sticky note and label the space around them.

I still have a convertor from memory stick to 5.25inch floppy that I am happy to give to anyone with a genuine use.

eg you put the stick in the thing that looks like a 5.25 inch floppy and then you can ready the memory stick likes its a floppy drive.

That's fascinating. Does it have all the features of a floppy drive, that is, being bootable? I could see that being very useful for retro computing and needing to move files around. You should offer it to LGR or the 8-Bit Guy on YouTube.

3.5", I'm sure, and I'm almost certain that device requires Windows drivers to function as expected. And a CR2025/2032 battery.

Sorry you are right, it's the 3.5 inch rigid disk, not sure what I was thinking.

please and thank you. id love to document it more contact info in profile

Are you sure it wasn’t 3.5”? 5.25” were the literal-floppy very thin disks most popular in the 80s.

Yes 3.5, sorry wasn't really on the ball that day.

I guess op means memory stick/ CF/ SD card reader that fits in a 5.25" disk bay, like a (floppy) disk drive fits in a disk bay, and not a memory stick that fits inside a disk that would be very technically challenging!!

A 3.5" floppy disk adapter (Sony MSAC-FD2MA) was made, natively compatible with early Sony Mavica cameras (later models included both a 3.5" floppy bay and a Memory Stick slot.) and DOS based Windows. The technical challenge was justified because mass storage options were limited at the time.

These Amazon reviews from 2002 show an interesting perspective on compatibility:

https://www.amazon.com/Sony-Floppy-Interface-Memory-MSAC-FD2...

In a traditional Sony/Ericsson smartphone (before they switched to SD which probably still works) using the USB cable the internal Memory Stick is accessible from a Windows PC no differently than a USB thumb drive or USB HDD.

So you can format the Memory Stick from the attached PC and then install an operating system like a Linux distribution if it fits, and it will boot.

It then boots the PC. The OS of the phone does not change.

That's using the phone's Memory Stick storage as an external boot device for a PC without the actual necessity for the PC to have an internal drive for that reason.

Similarly when inserted into the USB adapter, the Memory Stick can behave about the same as a regular bootable USB thumb drive.

No I got it wrong, it was a bad day, I meant 3.5 inch.

Interesting about the FAT block getting exhausted from write wear. I asked a guy in a camera store about memory sticks once. He said the great thing about them was that they never came back to the store, unlike other flash media that failed all the time.

That only severely impacts media without hardware wear leveling like Smartmedia cards. The more likely cause of failure is FAT corruption from power loss during writes.

They use nice NAND. Stayed with SLC the longest of all memory cards

I was always fond of that muted sun faded looking purple.

Author here if you have questions

>Memory Stick Classic stores all per-device management info in the Boot Block and in the Backup Boot Block. They are written in the factory and never erased/programmed again. Erasing them both will render a memory stick inoperative and make recovery rather hard, espcially if the data they contained is lost.

This also sounds like Memory Stick flash fraud would have been trivially easy; on SD cards you at least need to know the special private commands to reprogram the SD card controller.

It is. Just tried it. Works

I wonder if the PS Vita memory card is like a memory stick but in a different physical format.

I dislike those darn cards. Feels like a micro transaction for hardware. I was very happy when sd2vita became a thing.

I feel like those definitely were a thing because they wanted you to be able to upgrade the internal storage (unlike iPhone), but not read it on a computer (like iPhone).

They could've changed the public's perception on that easily if they just sold the vita in 32/64/128gb options that happened to just be a card that was already in the machine.

Yes

Aww ... seeing those memory sticks brings a huge wave of nostalgia ...

Thanks to the website creator

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