Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...

From: Carl Lowenstein <cdl_at_proxima.ucsd.edu>
Date: Fri May 3 16:59:40 2002

> From: "Stan Sieler" <sieler_at_allegro.com>
> To: "Douglas H. Quebbeman" <dquebbeman_at_acm.org>,
> "ClassicCmp List" <classiccmp_at_classiccmp.org>
> Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 12:06:37 -0700
> Subject: Re: Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...
> Cc: fmc_at_reanimators.org
> In-Reply-To: <000701c1f1e2$a795cd80$e401a8c0_at_tegjeff.com>
> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
>
> Re:
>
> > The emulator community is vigorously using a tape image container
> > format known as TAP for precisely this purpose.
> >
> > Each record from tape is written to file prefixed *and* suffixed
> > by a four-byte record length in little-endian format. A zero-
> > length record is represented by a 4-byte value of zero; although
> > intuition might call for 8-bytes (a prefix & suffix with nothing
> > in between), this is not the case. The convention appears to come
> > directly from FORTRAN 77's handling of unformatted sequential files.
> >
> > And EOF is represented by two consecutive zero-length records.
>
> Darn...sounds like a subset of what I use. I'd be interested
> in knowing more about TAP (with an eye towards adopting use of it),
> and would suggest some possibly missing features might be:

Is there any more information on "TAP" other than the program that I
find with Bob Supnik's simh stuff, namely "mtdump" that produces
a "TAP" image given a list of files? It would be nice if someone else
had already written the program that reads a real physical magtape and
produces a "TAP" image.

    carl
Received on Fri May 03 2002 - 16:59:40 BST