Tapewyrm

Recover QIC-40, QIC-80, QIC-3010 and QIC-3020 floppy tapes with a Greaseweazle v4.1.

Tapewyrm replaces the PC floppy controller a QIC-117 tape drive (Colorado, Conner, Iomega Ditto, ...) expects with a Greaseweazle running Tapewyrm firmware. It captures the raw flux of each track, then decodes it offline into a tar file with the backup's own file names, dates and attributes, plus a report of anything it could not recover.

Tapewyrm is bench software. It has recovered real tapes, but expect rough edges.

You need

• A Greaseweazle v4.1, a QIC-117 floppy-tape drive and a 34-pin floppy cable.
• A 5 V / 12 V supply for the drive. The Greaseweazle does not power it.
• uv, just, and PlatformIO Core and dfu-util to build and flash the firmware.

Quick start

Clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/indrora/tapewyrm.git
cd tapewyrm

Build the firmware:

just fw

Flash it. Unplug the Greaseweazle, strap its DFU header, and plug it back in. Then run the following, and unplug, unstrap and replug the board when it finishes:

just dfu

Check that the board answers:

just tapewyrm info

Connect the drive and power it, insert a cartridge, then wake the drive and read its status:

just tapewyrm drive select
just tapewyrm drive status

If drive status shows the drive, the cartridge and no error, you are ready to read a tape. Continue with Read a tape.

Note

The first flash goes through DFU. After that, tw update updates the firmware over USB with no strap (not yet run on a real board). See Flash the Greaseweazle if dfu-util does not see the board.

Documentation

The full documentation is in docs/ and builds as a site with just docs (live preview) or just docs-build.

Getting started	Install, flash, wire up a drive, read a tape, troubleshoot.
tw, qicsilver, cinnabar	Command reference for each tool.
Hardware	The Greaseweazle, tested drives and their quirks, cartridges.
Formats	The QIC standards as Tapewyrm uses them, and vendor backup formats.
Development	Packages, firmware, protocol, building and testing.
Specifications	The TWRF, TWTI/TWTZ and TWVL file formats.

Contributors and coding assistants: read STYLE.md and agents/AGENTS.md first.

License

Public domain under The Unlicense. The firmware derives from the Greaseweazle firmware by Keir Fraser, also under The Unlicense. No GPL code is included. The QIC standards in docs/qic-standards/ belong to their publishers and are not covered by The Unlicense.