physical tape drive emulation? ts-11?

This may seem silly, but it occured to me this morning (musing about how to boot an old 11/34) that I could use a device which would pretend to be an actual tape drive. There are lots of tape images out there (on the web) in the form of big disk files. It would be nice to be able to turn one of my pc's into a "virtual tape drive" by plugging a cable from the pc into a TS11 controller... Has anyone ever seen such a device? seems like it would not be that hard to build (he said, never having looked at the interface between a physical tape drive and a controller like a TS11). I hope to find an old RL01/2 drive around the Boston area (anyone?) but even when I do it seems bootstrapping will be an issue. Even if I grab one of those Dilog controllers which talk SCSI I'll need some way to load up the drives initially. It's just that those 9-track drives are *really heavy* :-) any comments appreciated! -brad