[comp.sys.amiga.misc] A3070 Tape Drive programming

lesle@NCoast.ORG (David A. Lesle) (06/19/91)

Is there any way to program the A3070 tape drive to read tapes
of lower density than 150M?  I have several tape cartridges with
tar files from a Sun system circa 1989 that I would like to read.

I remember that the Sun had several different devices depending
on which density you wanted to read, but I can't find anything
like that in the UNIX documentation.  I'd like to do this under
either AmigaDOS or UNIX so any help would be appreciated.

-- 
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Lesle                uucp: ncoast!lesle
CLEVELAND AREA-AMIGA USERS' GROUP (CA-AUG)     (216) 642-3344 (BBS)
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rhealey@kas.helios.mn.org (Rob Healey) (06/23/91)

In article <1991Jun19.171335.4227@news.media.mit.edu> masaru@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Masaru Sugai) writes:
>  If AmigaUX is to be release as a software product and A3070 is the only
>officially supported tape driver, many users would be no choice but to buy
>this drive, even though there are no support for AmigaDOS. Methinks the 
	
	Huh? The 3070 works great under AmigaDOS 2.0, and if you have
	Amiga UNIX you should have AmigaDOS 2.0. Look at BRU...

	OK, so you don't like BRU. Well, BRU is using the scsi.device
	driver to do the dirty work. If BRU can do it then other packages
	should be able to do it too.

	Maybe C= could comment officially if the SCSI driver under UNIX
	can handle generic 150M SCSI tape drives? Not neccessarily optimally,
	but will they work at all? How about support for other SCSI
	devices? Is the main SCSI driver written so that subdrivers can
	hook right into it? For Tapes, CD-ROM's, foo and bar SCSI gadgets etc...

		-Rob

bdb@becker.UUCP (Bruce D. Becker) (06/25/91)

In article <1991Jun19.171335.4227@news.media.mit.edu> masaru@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Masaru Sugai) writes:
|
|In article <1991Jun19.100002.26682@NCoast.ORG> lesle@NCoast.ORG (David A. Lesle) writes:
|>Is there any way to program the A3070 tape drive to read tapes
|>of lower density than 150M?  I have several tape cartridges with
|>tar files from a Sun system circa 1989 that I would like to read.
|>
|>I remember that the Sun had several different devices depending
|>on which density you wanted to read, but I can't find anything
|>like that in the UNIX documentation.  I'd like to do this under
|>either AmigaDOS or UNIX so any help would be appreciated.

	I wonder how to read 60 MB tapes under either
	AmigaDos or Unix also. I need to read one now
	as well, so it's not an idle question, sigh

|  If AmigaUX is to be release as a software product and A3070 is the only
|officially supported tape driver, many users would be no choice but to buy
|this drive, even though there are no support for AmigaDOS. Methinks the 
|advantage of Amiga is powerful hardware and rich PDS, and it's quite
|wasteful for both us and CBM not to release programming info at large.
|Or should I have opted for WangTek or Archive ? But I might have hassle 
|in case of AmigaUX as well.  I would like additional doc for my A3070 too.

	Early versions of Amiga Unix were on A2500 hardware,
	and came with Archive or Wangtek tape drives.  Both
	functioned without obvious problems, altho I'm not
	aware of which jumpers were different from normal
	factory settings (other than SCSI i.d., which is
	usually 4 for Amiga Unix tape streamers).

-- 
  ,u,	 Bruce Becker	Toronto, Ontario
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