TU58 dump tool on Linux?

On Wed, Jun 10, 2020 at 3:30 PM John Forecast via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: I originally wrote it to read/write SIMH disk images in various formats I get a 404 when I click on that link. I think you may have meant: https://github.com/simh/simtools/tree/master/converters/fsio That looks like it would be useful to me for a lot of other things, but probably not for reading from actual TU58 drives. A real TU58 drive hooked up to a system running Linux does not look anything like a block device. Linux has no idea what it is; it's just something hooked up to a serial port. To read tape blocks, it would be up to a user space program to send the TU58 the right MRSP commands and interpret the responses. There are a number of programs that solve the opposite problem, and make a PC pretend to be a TU58, but those don't help when what you want to do is talk to an actual TU58. I haven't seen a program for that. Perhaps some code from the NetBSD kernel could be useful, but I'm guessing that dealing with that would be more trouble than just writing a new program. There are some undocumented MRSP commands, but the documented commands should be sufficient to read a tape.