GDS Tapeouts solved...

I want to think Paul Stein over at deepchip.com for coming to my assistance with the exact answer I've been trying to find for sometime. I've been sitting on literally hundreds of chip "tapeouts" of various proprietary Atari chip designs from the 70's through the 80's for various chips used in their arcade, home video game and home computer systems. I plethora of legacy designs that would've been a true loss to classic computing and video gaming history had they lanquished to a point where the 9 track tapes would've become unreadable. (As it was, these tapes were horribly stored in an outside storage warehouse in MA. for over 6 years exposed to extreme heat, moisture, cold, etc... so its been amazing that they have survived as well as they have over the last 20-30 years - depending on their original year of origin) Paul used to work with GDS II and Calma systems and gave me the command needed to recover the contents of these tapes back into a readable and useable file: dd if=/dev/deviceName of=/path/file ibs=2048 obs=512 conv=block files=n Using Mandrake 9 on a PII 333mhz system, I set-up a samba connect over to one of my WinXP machines and then I simply dropped the files= switch as I was unsure just how many files may have resided on the tape, but it worked like a charm, I was able to open the files up in my GDS viewer software and now I can enjoy several weeks of sleepness nights recovering all of these chip designs from these tapes, including several chips which were prototypes meant for several high end Atari advanced 68000 based computer systems. It would be interesting to see if these chips could be fgpa'd and these once rumored super graphics computers could be brought back to life, could be fun :-) Well, I thought I'd share this info with everyone as I know I've asked many a times to the group if anyone could assist and I've been at this now since, oh about 2003, so its good to finally be able to access this data at last. Curt -- No virus found in this outgoing message. Checked by AVG Anti-Virus. Version: 7.0.344 / Virus Database: 267.11.14/130 - Release Date: 10/12/2005