[HN Gopher] Documenting Sony Memory Stick
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Documenting Sony Memory Stick
Author : elvis70
Score : 198 points
Date : 2022-03-19 06:33 UTC (16 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (dmitry.gr)
(TXT) w3m dump (dmitry.gr)
| LightG wrote:
| Aww ... seeing those memory sticks brings a huge wave of
| nostalgia ...
|
| Thanks to the website creator
| boondaburrah wrote:
| 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.
| jl6 wrote:
| Pure coincidence that 0xAA55 marks the end of the PC master
| boot record?
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| wildzzz wrote:
| 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.
| a2800276 wrote:
| 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" :)
| _Microft wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| >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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| It is. Just tried it. Works
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Author here if you have questions
| LeoPanthera wrote:
| 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.
| moltke wrote:
| 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.
| ChuckMcM wrote:
| 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.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| They make CF size cases for SD and microSD.
| cure wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| kmeisthax wrote:
| 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.
| makeitdouble wrote:
| 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.
| dtgriscom wrote:
| I bought a pile of transparent, clamshell (full size) SD card
| cases. I label those, and keep my microSD cards in them.
| noja wrote:
| What did you label your Memory Sticks? They were expensive, did
| you not re-use them?
| reaperducer wrote:
| 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.
| throwaway81523 wrote:
| 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.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| They use nice NAND. Stayed with SLC the longest of all memory
| cards
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| 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.
| theogravity wrote:
| I wonder if the PS Vita memory card is like a memory stick but in
| a different physical format.
| dmitrygr wrote:
| Yes
| flatiron wrote:
| I dislike those darn cards. Feels like a micro transaction for
| hardware. I was very happy when sd2vita became a thing.
| gonesilent wrote:
| I was always fond of that muted sun faded looking purple.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| durnygbur wrote:
| 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.
| IgorPartola wrote:
| 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.
| gambiting wrote:
| 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.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| 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.
| airbreather wrote:
| 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.
| causality0 wrote:
| 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.
| CompuHacker wrote:
| 3.5", I'm sure, and I'm almost certain that device requires
| Windows drivers to function as expected. And a CR2025/2032
| battery.
| gkop wrote:
| Are you sure it wasn't 3.5"? 5.25" were the literal-floppy very
| thin disks most popular in the 80s.
| roywashere wrote:
| 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!!
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