[Simh] [HECnet] tape image manipulations...

[Clem Cole]

Many thanks.
I think we all have created a library of tape tools over the years.   I'll
put on my todo this to get my set together.


As for the OSX lack of mtio.h - i've just pulled it from FreeBSD and never
had an issue - obviously there is not driver. I 100% agree -- it does seems
nuts and I've b*tched at my friends at Apple about it a few times.
Another thing I have on my todo list is try to slide the drivers back into
an hackintosh i had running on a vm in a system that has an old DEC/Adaptec
PCI card in it that I still use for SCSI tapes.   That said, when I have
needed the tape I've just used the BSD driver on the base system.


Clem


On Sun, Feb 16, 2014 at 5:51 AM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:

> 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
>
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