> > > 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.
Not really any more information that I know if other than what
you've seen here- it's a minimalist convention.
But I can recommend Eric Smith's tapecopy program as far as other
code to look at. It accompanies tapedump & t10backup in his package.
You should be able to find his package here:
http://www.36bit.org/dec/software/unix-util/
hth,
-dq
Received on Fri May 03 2002 - 21:42:43 BST