30 Aug
2013
30 Aug
'13
2:32 p.m.
On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 9:40 AM, Hutch <shutchman at gmail.com> wrote:
Pretends to be a tape drive would be what I would prefer. Similar to the HCX2001 floppy
drive emulator that uses an SD card for storage.
Here's a way-off idea from existing components... I wonder if one
could attach a SCSI<->IDE adapter to a 3rd Party TMSCP controller? If
so, then one might be able to _then_ hang an IDE<->CF interface off of
that. It would be one CF card==one "tape", but it would work. A
"real" TK50 stores up to 95MB (if the controller keeps the tape fed),
so a 128MB CF card would hold an entire tape's worth of bytes (unless
somehow blocking sizes messed things up and it took a larger card to
digest what was thrown at it).
I can see three reasons for emulating a TK50 (perhaps there are
more)... 1) installing from tape image files, 2) simple
no-moving-parts backup and restore of a Qbus MicroVAX (which should
not cause odd blocking issues) and 3) bootable diagnostics from an
image file (which _might_ have blocking issues - bootable magtape
certainly had variable block sizes and was slightly non-trivial to
write tapes, therefore). Is one of those your primary goal, or is it
something else?
-ethan