11 Mar
2019
11 Mar
'19
10:42 p.m.
A few years back AJ Palmgren helped me recover data from a S8000 tape using
his hacked QIC drive. He fed the data coming off the drive into a Saleae
logic analyzer. I took the gigantic dumps and wrote a software decoder. The
data on the tape are MFM encoded. It went pretty well and I could recover
the entire tape.
http://www.datormuseum.se/computers/others/zilog-s8000/extract-s8000-tapes
So you can read these tapes by other means than the original drive. It just
requires some tinkering with the drive to get the correct tracks and some
software.