Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux... - test-drb@ccmp.vtda.org

3 May 2002

...
  From: "Stan Sieler"
&lt;sieler(a)allegro.com&gt;
 To: "Douglas H. Quebbeman" &lt;dquebbeman(a)acm.org&gt;rg>,
         "ClassicCmp List" &lt;classiccmp(a)classiccmp.org&gt;
 Date: Thu, 2 May 2002 12:06:37 -0700
 Subject: Re: Tape dumping programs for Unix/Linux...
 Cc: fmc(a)reanimators.org
 In-Reply-To: &lt;000701c1f1e2$a795cd80$e401a8c0(a)tegjeff.com&gt;
 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7BIT
 Re:
  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.
    carl