[Simh] tape image manipulations...

[Johnny Billquist]

Since from time to time, I get questions about the different tape image 
formats that exists, as well as how to read/write tapes from Unix, I 
decided to publish a set of small programs I initially write many, many 
years ago. In the process of cleaning things up to make them more 
presentable, I also made them more flexible. The odd person might have 
seen these programs in earlier reincarnations from me at some point in time.

Anyway, I have a set of four programs, that a few people might find 
useful, if they play on Unix systems.

tpr - reads from a physical tape and creates an image on disk
tpw - reads an image from disk and writes it to a physical tape
tpc - copy/convert a disk image
tpx - examine/verify a disk image

These programs will handle both .tpc images (2 byte record length 
headers) and .tap images (4 byte record length headers and footers).
The programs tries to automatically identify the format of the file, but 
you can also force a format.

They are still extremely simple and stupid programs, and have very 
little error handling, or help. Feel free to ask if you have questions. 
Suggestions, as well as patches are also welcome.

The files can be found under ftp://ftp.update.uu.se/pub/pdp11/tptools.tar

(And yes, I know they will not compile under OSX - Apple in their 
infinite wisdom have dropped support for tapes, and thus mtio.h no 
longer is around, and their man-pages also have big holes around tapes, 
where plenty of references from other man-pages exists... tpc and tpx is 
easy to fix for OSX though, but you're out of luck as far as tpr and tpw 
goes...)

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol