Since we are talking about 1/4" tape drives

Richard wrote: At the theoretical level, the SCSI part's probably not too difficult - software-wise, I don't think the minimal command set needed to look like a SCSI tape device is particularly complex. The physical interface is simple enough, too. What I have no clue about is anything to do with FPGAs, though, or how easy it'd be to do the "communicate with another system" bit (via what - ethernet? USB?). I've got a bunch of Torch Manta SCSI-floppy bridge boards in storage, and those were quite neat - they use a NCR 5380 IC as the SCSI controller and Hitachi 63B03 as the CPU (along with some local RAM and ROM, and a 2793 FDC). In this day and age though, maybe there's no benefit to having a dedicated SCSI chip, and a FPGA would be able to twiddle signals perfectly fast enough* to keep up with demand - but that would have been the old-school way of doing it. * ISTR there being some timing constraints in SCSI when acting as a target - the host can take as long as it wants about things, but for certain actions the target is expected to respond within a certain time. All of which perhaps doesn't really answer your question, other than to say "it's easy for someone who knows how" :-) cheers Jules