9 track tapes and block sizes

[Matt Burke]

On 17/09/2020 07:38, Dave Wade G4UGM via cctalk wrote:
> The docs for SIMH .TAP files are here:-
>
> http://simh.trailing-edge.com/docs/simh_magtape.pdf
>
> be careful as there are also non-SIMH .tap formats 
>
> In the IBM Mainframe emulation world there is also .AWS, an IBM format
> introduced with its P390 Microchannel Mainframe card  
> and .HET a Hercules extension to .AWS which allows compression
>

vtapeutils is quite handy for translating between (or listing) a few of
the emulated tape formats. It supports AWS, TPC (2 byte record headers)
and TAP (Simh - 4 byte record headers).

https://sourceforge.net/projects/vtapeutils/

I've used TPC on RSX-11M and VMSTPC on VAX/VMS to read 9-track tapes.
Then I used vtapeutils to convert from TPC to TAP format for Simh.

Matt