Smartmedia Card Spec Opened, available free (2000)
31 points by brudgers 5 days ago | 23 comments
  • brudgers 5 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.

    • happycube 2 days 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.

      • brudgers 2 days ago |
        Thanks. Do you know of a good library for emulating flash?

        Looking at the spec, it seems doable, but it is way out of my wheelhouse (assuming I even have a wheelhouse).

    • throw-the-towel 2 days 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 2 days ago |
    Ah, the 2000's, when CompactFlash cards weren't that compact, and SmartMedia wasn't at all smart.
  • 1970-01-01 2 days 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 2 days 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.

    • robotnikman 2 days ago |
      CompactFlash is still used in professional equipment last I've checked
  • EvanAnderson 2 days 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

    • reaperducer 2 days 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 2 days 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.

    • dan_sbl 2 days 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.
  • mghackerlady 2 days 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
    • brudgers 2 days ago |
      In practice, because Smartmedia reads from the large face readers require about as as Compact Flash which reads from one end.

      In addition, CF uses IDE protocol and has more volume for more memory chips. Smartmedia uses a bespoke and initially proprietary format (plus two incompatible logic levels) and its thinness meant the spec only describes one and two chip variants.

      But they seem to work fine when I buy them from ebay and use them in old electronics.

  • kstrauser 2 days 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 2 days 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

      • kstrauser 2 days ago |
        There wasn't a clear winner, to be sure, but there was Sony vs everyone else. That was kind of the thing at the time, often because the other standard wasn't infected with DRM and the notion that a customer could duplicate something without paying Sony for the privilege was beyond their tolerance. MiniDiscs were infected with it. Memory Sticks had their MagicGate. And don't forget about the time they sold about 22 million music CDs infected with rootkits to stop CD ripping.

        The Sony of today is vastly less awful about this nonsense. PlayStation games are still copy-protected but that's just how that whole industry runs. I'm glad they started being mostly pro-consumer somewhere along the way.

    • tjoff 2 days ago |
      Yeah, that sucked. But we still have Apple, sigh.
      • kstrauser 2 days 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.
        • tjoff 2 days ago |
          A bit like saying that the pictures taken on a sony-camera can be viewed on any display.

          Apples software only run on their own hardware and their hardware only runs their own software. It is a huge split in the ecosystem and any advance Apple has makes future of computing more bleak and proprietary and void of choice.

          Their constant battles with right to repair alone is pathetic in its own right. And they had to literally be forced to give up their lightning connector, because their walled garden of accessories was just too profitable. Not sure how one can view that differently than what Sony did.

          Only difference is that Apple has a borderline monopoly, which of course makes it immeasurably worse. Sony lost because of competition.

          • kstrauser 2 days ago |
            While those things are true, it's still a different animal. Yes, Apple's hardware+OS combo is a walled garden. However, while you can't easily modify that hardware, you can connect it to any brand of SD card or monitor or hard drive or keyboard or mouse or trackpad or whatever. You don't have to buy Apple-branded memory cards or other accessories. With Sony, you had no option.

            I'm not arguing against what you're saying, but I think it's orthogonal.

            • tjoff a day ago |
              Sonys crap at least to my knowledge had broad compatibility. Whereas Apple often deliberately make sub-par experiences when not in their own turf. You just connected your sony-camera over usb, or just had a plastic adapter for the memory stick.

              Seems right on par for the dongle-life that Apple was/is famous for and the lightning-connector alone has created me much more headache than Sony ever did. Which is impressive considering I've owned several Sony (or SonyEricsson) devices but I've never owned an Apple device. At least Sonys proprietary crap were decently priced, at least for the times I looked at it. Didn't enjoy it one bit but I didn't feel robbed.

              Apples stunts in the past by deliberately making chargers incompatible is on a whole other level of evil but I guess that's prescribed by now. Sony put rootkits on CDs though so that is pretty extraordinarily bad too of course.

              The reason you can connect anything to a mac is because Apple is the only rotten fruit left. Apples stuff work pretty darn terrible for everyone not in Apples ecosystem.

              I don't want to pile on but I just can't see how what Sony did was bad but what Apple does isn't. Feels like people put a blind eye to everything they are dependent upon.

    • robotnikman 2 days ago |
      I remember having to deal with them when my parents first got a digital camera when I was a kid, and me being the kid who knew tech they left it to me to figure out how to get the photos off the camera and onto the printer. 128mb of storage, seemed so big at the time. And I remember seeing the price tag for a 1GB memory stick, was a whopping $500 lol