Claude reverse-engineers a QIC tape drive by disassembling its ROM
Claude × retrocomputing: emulating a QIC-117 tape drive
Dmitry Brant, a retrocomputing enthusiast, adds QIC-117 tape drive emulation to 86Box, a low-level PC emulator. Using Claude Opus 5, he disassembled the ROM of a Colorado drive to uncover undocumented vendor-specific commands, enabling real DOS and Windows backup software to read virtual tapes. He also emulated the parallel-port Iomega Ditto drive and provides pre-formatted tape images.
We could unsolder the ROM chip from the drive, perform a disassembly of the ROM, and get a complete understanding of all the commands that the drive supports, including all the diagnostic bits!
- ggm
I'd be interested in access to real drives capable of reading real tapes, to get archival data off my tapes. And, DAT format.
If the emulation aides in FPGA or small device coding to make modern interface bindings to older devices and so drops the entry cost to get an older SCSI or firewire drive working, I'd be delighted.
If this is emulation of the command set aimed at "driving" a software emulated tape drive, It's for another purpose. It won't help me recover old media.
(cheapskate: there are competent, expensive companies which specialise in this kind of data recovery. The problem is cost/benefit, not actual capability at any price)
- GalaxyNova
I think LLMs go against the retrocomputing ethos