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simh / simtools

Tools useful when using or migrating to or from a simh simulator environment
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Add mktape program #13

Closed Rhialto closed 4 years ago

Rhialto commented 4 years ago

I seem to have this hanging around for quite a while; I'd better try and get it merged.

Rhialto commented 4 years ago

I tried to add a commit to resolve the merge conflict, but it didn't get added automatically to this pull request.

Moreover when I tried to make a new pull request, it then included extra changes to macro11 which should not be there.

Really I hate git(hub).

markpizz commented 4 years ago

I'll look through what you've got here and pick up what's new. I'll get back to you with questions when I have them. Some of your problems relate to the fact that you were trying to merge whole simtools versions which haven't been related from a git point of view. I'll let you know what I find.

Meanwhile, as to mktape (or mksimtape), I'm pretty sure that everything this tool can do is now built into the internal capabilities that are available when you ATTACH a tape. See HELP TS ATTACH in the PDP11 simulator.

Rhialto commented 4 years ago

I notice that the change to the Makefile (remove quotes) has been made by somebody else in the mean time. Also, there is the addition of the mksimtape program, which roughly does the same as mktape. That makes mksimtape nearly superfluous.

I had to search again what I was doing with this, but I was creating a 2.11BSD boot tape from its constituents. It seems there was no ready-made tape available. Also, at the time, there was no program in the simtools to create a tape where files have a different block size each. From my reading of HELP TS ATTACH, that isn't covered there either.

But I found mktape. I had to extend it a bit, because it assumed input files that were fully padded (and the inputs I had available weren't), so I added some options how to handle that.

In that last thing, there may be a feature that could be added to mksimtape: currently it always seems to pad the last record of the file, if it is short. It may be desirable to have an option to translate that into a short tape record. For my case of creating the 2.11BSD boot tape always-padding would have been good enough but it could be useful sometimes to have other options.

Rhialto commented 4 years ago

Since there is nothing new left in this cloned repo and merge request, I'm going to close it. Then I'm going to re-clone the simtools, so that I can make a merge request to pull in the updated macro11.