Tape imaging

On 8/10/2016 7:04 AM, Tor Arntsen wrote: I'd find a way to get it to some format acceptable to simh as a lot of the tapes you have will probably work on emulators. There are already utilities for going to and from that, and perhaps even some that will compile and run on your hardware to go from SCSI devices or serial block devices to that format. Also WRT to the above format, I believe that most tape formats have a block size for the previous record so that the tape can be read in reverse. Not sure I saw that from the description. I have a simple program that creates a single file per tape block on reading. A zero length file is a tape mark. File number on the tape is the first part of the file name, and record number of the block is the second part, with the file name being 4 hex ascii, a "-" character and a 4 hex ascii character. I then read that to convert to the archival formats, or to examine the file prior to encoding. Al K's reader and format has meta data related to tape errors encountered so that tape images can be padded out with some filler for possible recovery or use of tapes that are unreadable. I have not written any of that code, since it usually isn't available from raw drivers on Linux. his reading method uses specialized hardware to digitize the files, and is somewhat different when the metadata is possible to create. thanks Jim