Description

Hardware

The Spectravideo SVI-777 Stringy Floppy Drive is not actually a floppy drive but a special cassette data recorder. Nowadays the cassette tapes for the SVI-777 (Microwafer tapes) are very, very rare.

This device requires a MSX computer with at least 64KB RAM and can't be used on MSX turbo R.

It needs to be connected to both the data recorder connector and the general port 2. It must be powered by 2, size D, batteries. It can save roughly 14~100 kB per tape, depending on the length of the tape.

Brand	Spectravideo
Model	SVI-777
Year
Region
Launch price
Package content	Stringy Floppy Drive, Master Tape
Emulation

Software

The operating system must be loaded before use. It is provided on a Microwafer tape. The steps to load it are as follows:

Connect the Stringy Floppy Drive to the data recorder and joystick 2 connectors
Turn ON the connected peripheral devices and the MSX
Insert the Master Tape into the Stringy Floppy Drive
Type: BLOAD"cas:boot",R under Basic (the name "boot" can be omitted) to install the Stringy Operating System (SOS) including a MSX-BASIC extension: see SOS BASIC

The Master Tape also contains:

a program to format a new Microwafer tape: SFORMAT.SYS
a program to copy files from Microwafer tape or data cassette tape to another Microwafer tape: FILECOPY.SYS
several loaders and other files of the Stringy Operating System (SOS)