[Simh] A basic question; can I mount tar files as tape devices?

[Mark Pizzolato - Info Comm]

On Thursday, March 12, 2015 at 5:24 PM, Michael Huff wrote:
> I have tried creating tar files and then mounting them as devices and/or
> reading from them with tar but I haven't had any success. I've tried
> googling and looking around, but I haven't figured out how to do this.

Tar files are simply streams of bytes.  They are NOT simh tape files with built in record sizes and tape marks.  There may be tools to convert a tar file to a simh structured tape, but I personally don't know of one.  It wouldn't be too hard to write a program to do that though.  The simh tape structure is documented in section A.3 of http://simh.trailing-edge.com/pdf/simh_doc.pdf

> My host machine is Linux Mint/17/amd64 and I'm using the vax780
> simulator with 4.3BSD, and I'm trying to work out how to get files and
> and out of there (I haven't had any better luck with networking).

If you use the latest simh code from https://github.com/simh/simh/archive/master.zip and you happen to have 2 network interfaces on your Linux Mint host machine you can easily get networking working.  If have two NICs I can walk you through the details.  Alternatively, bridged networking can be setup, but the details are significantly more complicated...

- Mark