Philipp Hachtmann <hachti at hachti.de> wrote: Nothing laughable about it. As far as I know, it should work just fine. When you need to understand is that you can't use any "normal" software to read them, and that include any device drivers. The tapes are written in the other direction. And that's something the device driver is involved in. As far as I know, you can actually use any DECtape controller to read/write the tapes, not just the TD8E. But the same problem applies to all of them. You need a special device driver. But apart from that, it should be pretty straight forward. You basically do eveything the same way you would do with DECtapes, except you set the transport direction inverted to what a DECtape would do for all operations. DECtape and LINCtape are clever in the way they identify blocks though, so that the block markers can be detected the same no matter which way the transport is moving, which is why you seem to recognize the tapes somehow. (The tape markers were designed so that the fluxes would become the same no matter which direction you read them.) One last thing. It *might* be that you'll have to do some bitfiddling after reading the tapes. A DECtape (and LINCtape) records only three bits at a time. When reading forward, you read 4 rows to get all 12 bits. And of course, they get stuffed in a certain order. Reading in reverse means you get groups of 3 bits possibly shuffled around, as well as being inverted. Depending on the LINCtape format, and how the TD8E reacts, things might end up just right, or might require the bit fiddling. You'll have to experiment... Johnny