Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...

From: Frank McConnell <fmc_at_reanimators.org>
Date: Thu May 2 16:20:53 2002

"Douglas H. Quebbeman" <dquebbeman_at_acm.org> wrote (after Stan):
> > - ability to flag if a particular tape record had a hard error
> > while reading it
>
> No (I can say this even though I'm about to ask): do you mean an
> unrecoverable error, or one that was corrected by the hardware
> (as opposed to being corrected by software)? Either way, if the
> error was corrected, see my response above.

This is useful -- if you are working with an only copy of a tape
and it is marginal, this lets you record in the recovered image
just which bits could not be reliably read.

I'm not sure if "recovered read error" has such uses. Stan?
Enlighten us?

> > - ability to flag if an End-of-tape marker/indicator was seen
> > while reading the the current record (again, not all
> > hardware/OS's support getting that information)
>
> No, and again, I can't see how this data would be used to recreate
> the tape or would be needed by an emulator. It's kind of like asking
> if a particular hardware emulator also emulates memory parity errors
> so that you can see memory parity errors in the logs. Why??

I can see some use for this if you want to use the recovered
image file with an emulator -- you can provide the physical-EOT
indication to the emulator. What's it good for? I don't know, but
I wouldn't be surprised if there is some software that relies on
seeing the physical-EOT mark while reading.

> Anyway, I encode that kins of descriptive information (what kind
> of computer, encoding, #tracks, etc) in the filename, or in the
> name of the directory containing the file, or in a README.

There is something to be said for keeping all the related bits
together in a single container, it keeps them from getting separated.

> However, I'm not King of this Kingdom, we're a collective
> (right out of Monty Python's Search for the Holy Grail).
> You might try hooking up with the emulator community and
> ask your questions there.

Where does one go to find "the emulator community"?

I don't think there is one, I think there are several, just like there
are at least two "TAP formats", both having to do with container files
for tapes, only one is for proper serial magnetic media like I think
we are discussing, and the other is for audio data cassettes on some
1980s bitty box (a Sinclair Spectrum I think).

Are they going to care? Should they, so long as there's a reasonable
way to down-convert a fancier tape container file format to their
flavor of TAP format?

-Frank McConnell
Received on Thu May 02 2002 - 16:20:53 BST