Wanted: SIMH VMS quick test

[Chuck Guzis]

On 12/16/2014 06:29 AM, Al Kossow wrote:
> On 12/15/14 9:04 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
>> Okay, I've been working with my SCSI tape stuff and I'd like someone
>> to check a .TAP image on a VAX VMS SIMH setup.
>
> I looked at it with my tools. There are THREE extra bytes at the end of
> the first record, before the 50 00 00 00.
> Bob may pad to a short, but I don't think he pads to a long. The images
> I create don't pad a record at all, what
> you see is what you get.
>
> Looks like VMS Fortran 4.5

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/docs/simh_magtape.pdf is the document that 
I'm using for this.  I clearly have some extra padding in the 
records--that's a bug in my own padding routine.

The document does say that records will be padded to an even byte 
boundary--is this incorrect?

If I were to append a metadata record at the end of the image, would 
this hurt anyone?  Perhaps preceded by 4 tapemarks?

What I'd like to do is standardize the format in which I'm storing 
images.  In particular, metadata as part of the image is important.

SIMH doesn't seem to have any way to record corrected errors or even 
un-corrected errors.  Very strange; one wonders why.

Yes, it's a FORTRAN 4.5 tape--just one that I have lying around.

--Chuck