Surprisingly this seems to be possible, we have already read some data off a tape written 30 years ago or more. At only 300 frames Per inch the bits are so much bigger they are less likely to degrade (I hope). There is an engineer's facility to 'Read All Tracks' which we will use to read the entire tape, hopefully without stopping and send all 40MB to a parallel port we are building with a built in FIFO. The data will then hopefully be captured onto a modern machine. -- If you are interested, I could probably get you one of these when they're available http://bitsavers.org/tools/wizl/tapewizl/ Paul Pierce built something similar to what you did for recovering 7-track data, and discovered that you really need to recover the data using analog techniques to get any reliability. http://www.piercefuller.com/collect/proj.html