So about 1/2 inch splices should be working fine.
I may have to redo this, the shield is too short...

That's fine, although that might be too short for you to work with. What do you mean that the shield is too short?

There's more cable sticking out than shield. I should be able to work with it, though

Ahh, gotcha. Good luck with it, I'm sure you'll do fine.

Okay, right now I have the four cords splices together and covered with electrical tape.
Is it a problem if some of the shield is exposed? How detrimental would it be?
Or does it all have to be covered?

As long as it's not shorted to any of the four power/data wires, that's fine.

Great...0C00:Not detected. Again. I'm about to the point of just buying one...even though I already tried that...

I'm looking at the female end of the cable and it says "Part of Sony Model MSAC-US2".
After a google search, it took me to a page that said it was a Memorystick reader/writer. But it doesn't have the second part attached. It's just the cord end. I tried (before cutting the cable) using it as a usual USB extender (plugging one end into the PC, a flash drive in the other) and it worked fine. Maybe there's some different hardware or something...

That's a pain in the neck; I can't think what the problem might be. Do you happen to have a multimeter or continuity tester to check the integrity of the four wires? I'd guess you probably do not.

You guessed right.
Both cables worked beforehand, though. It's just now that they won't work.
I'm kind of getting tired of (trying to) make cables...I've been trying that for months...
Is there a Female A to Male Mini-B adapter available somewhere from, say, walmart or kmart or some large-scale store like that? Something where one could have it mailed to the store, instead of having to get it mailed to the house?

It's not the mailing part that I mind, it's just that my parents have no idea that I even have a calc like the 84, let alone know what one can do with it. And I intend to keep it that way.

I've already tried this: http://www.walmart.com/ip/Emerge-Tech-3-USB-2.0-Universal-Cable-Kit/12575355

I got an idea (from omni) that the cable I'm trying to splice may be the wrong type. I've been trying to splice a USB Mini-B, when I really need a Mini-A.
Dang, can't find any.
Also, I've heard you can effectively change a mini-B to a mini-A by inserting a "small sheet of metal" to connect the two pins on the far right, pin X and pin 4.
Does anybody know how to do this?
Edit: pic

Edit2: found better pic

Okay, I got the thing working. I just had to cram a little ball of foil into the far-right part of the plug, and it works now.
I have multiple flash drives that work fine (cruzers) but the dane-elecs aren't working.
MSD8X always returns error 030D. It converts to 781 in decimal, which isn't on this list.
Vendor ID is 2103, Product ID is 1001.

Device that doesn't auto-run: Vendor ID is 0781, Product ID is 5530. It's one of the Cruzers, a 2gig FAT-formatted drive.

Oh and for the record, I'm using the adapter from this kit.

That's great to hear; congrats! I'm sure there's a ... more elegant way to achieve the pin short, but at least you got it working. I'll be sure to poke BrandonW with the information you've gleaned on more devices that do and do not work.

Yes, it's working...but--

Something's really wrong. It's wiped the drive clean twice and left a bunch of corrupted stuff in its wake.
The folder's filled with filenames like " R`è°xi.3i", "`µ└½<½.uU", and "<╒ê▐ííú7.bn".
The last one's a "Y'6" file by the way....

It won't let me delete the messed up things either.
"Cannot delete file: Cannot read from the source file or disk."
I'd post a printscreen, but every blasted image server available is blocked as "games."

Guess I'll have to format the drive or something...

I assume that you formatted it as FAT16, correct? Otherwise I'm sure you'd get lots of errors and corruption, although I'd expect MSD8x to actively complain if the drive had the wrong formatting.

It works fine...most of the time. Sometimes I try to copy an 8xp to/from the drive and the whole thing freezes. The light on the drive does from blinking (busy) to solid on (waiting).
I've gotten like 5 RAM clears in the past twelve hours.
It says it's formatted as FAT on the computer. In the format disk thing, I can never find FAT16. Just FAT32 and FAT.
It did this to one of my other drives too, and that one was/is positively FAT16.

I found a file that seems to be in a language other than "╖4oçg°u.ä∙╓". What's "USBC3.14"?

I believe that FAT is FAT16 (I don't think anyone uses FAT8 at all anymore), so that should be fine. I've given BrandonW the promised poke; perhaps he'll turn up around this evening for HCWP!

(haven't read the thread, so forgive me if this has already been covered)

Your weird crashes and instabilities are almost guaranteed to be because your calculator doesn't have all the extra RAM pages. msd8x uses them, so if you lack those pages, it's hardly going to work if at all for you.

Sorry. One of the things on my to-do list is to rework it (somehow) to not need them.

Windows does show FAT16 as "FAT", yes. It also shows FAT12 as "FAT" -- it doesn't distinguish anymore (at least with Windows XP and up).

My calc has the extra RAM pages. Omnicalc's RAM restore and virtual calc features work.
About to reformat. Is it FAT12 or FAT16?

Re-formatted. It's working fine so far.
Have a backup of the drive on my 8gig just in case...

I'm sure that FAT16 is supported; I doubt that FAT12 is. I'm glad to hear that it's working so far.