[Simh] VAX Tape Emulation?

[Zane Healy]

> On Jan 24, 2018, at 2:17 PM, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
>> On Jan 24, 2018, at 5:07 PM, Mark Pizzolato <Mark at infocomm.com> wrote:
>> 
>> On Wednesday, January 24, 2018 at 2:03 PM, Zane Healy wrote:
>>> What type/size of tapes does the VAX emulation support?  I was looking
>>> through the doc’s and it wasn’t obvious to me.  Is there a size limit?
>> 
>> How big is your disk?  :-)
>> 
>> Really, there is no actual limit on total tape size, since the data format is 
>> only concerned with tape records which are then processed sequentially.
> 
> Then again, SIMH supports limiting the emulated tape size.  The SIMH VAX document shows that it uses this feature: the tape units can be set to a specific size limit, or 0 for unlimited.  The same is true for various other emulations; I see the PDP11 has the same sort of thing, and for example its TMSCP controller defaults to 98 MB (TK50 size).
> 
> 	paul
> 

How do I set the tape size to 0?  I’d say that’s a stupid question, but I’ve had very little luck finding documentation on the options.  Though I won’t rule out that I might be blind. :-)

While looking for the answer to that, I may have found a better solution.  It looks like I can create a 50GB disk.  If I can do that, I can move my Alpha disks over to SIMH.  That would actually be my preference.  The two disks I’m the most concerned with are ODS-2.  The other two are ODS-5, and I think there are some filenames from OpenSource software that will have issues with ODS-2, but I can selectively move the data I want backed up to an ODS-2 disk.

The joke is, my 50GB disk only has about 8GB of data on it, one of the 36GB drives is the big one at about 26GB.

Zane