On Tue, 3 Oct 2017, Al Kossow wrote:
As far as I know, no one has successfully made a copy of a Tek cartridge tape in an image format. The tapes use two tracks, one for clock and one for data. Encoding beyond that has not been determined. I still have
I can backup Tek405x tapes. Our 4051 has a very featurerich ROM extension called COMBI ROM and a RAM back pack used to load the COMBI ROM from tape into RAM and use that as an extension ROM. This COMBI ROM can not only access tape records directly (they are 256 bytes records), but it also handles CBM floppy disk drives (e.g. 8050) attached to the GPIB. I've written a BASIC program that reads all tape files and stores them 1:1 as disk files on a floppy. This is not truly the same as imaging a tape cartridge, but it is better than nothing ;-) AFAIK there is no additional metadata other than the tape file header (read with CALL "HEADER", file number [,header string]). The tape records are read with CALL "TREAD", string variable.
Christian
