On Sun, Nov 02, 2025 at 02:06:00PM -0500, Paul Koning wrote: > > Is Dave's setup a DECtape drive, with 10 tracks on 3/4 inch width? > Drive is actually LINCtape with weird tape path so DECtapes need to be respooled on another drive to LINCtape orientation. Looks like this https://www.ricomputermuseum.org/collections-gallery/interesting_computer_items/computer-operations-inc-linc-tape
All tracks are available from the head separately except mark track which is why I picked it. Current project is LINCtapes. Need to do some code changes to merge in my DECtape decoder. Bottom links are recent stuff. https://www.pdp8online.com/images/index.shtml > Analog capture would be a great option for old tapes. It's likely there will > be tapes that don't read cleanly with standard controllers, but could be > recovered with analog capture and good DSP. > So far not much DSP. Deskew and handling mark track errors seems to get most blocks. > And yes, it would of course deal with odd formats. Then again, reading > PDP-10 tapes on a PDP-11 is easy; RT-11 has a standard utility that does > this, using the controller's standard "read all" command. I'm not sure how a > PDP-8 would cope, given that the standard PDP-8 blocksize is quite different. > > One thing an analog capture system would do that DECtapes would have trouble > with is reading LINCtape, because RALL assumes (I believe) standard DECtape > mark track codes and LINCtape has an entirely different mark track. > Had been using my PDP-8 TD8E to read DEC & LINC tapes then BeagleBone instead of TD8E. Some of the LINCtapes I could read with the new setup I couldn't read with the old. There was PIP10 to read PDP-10 tapes so I think all PDP-8 controllers could deal with the different block size. LINCtapes have inverted timing track and different mark track codes. TD8E could read them some with inverter on timing track signal and special code.
