A3070 Tape Drive programming

[Milton Scritsmier]

In article <1991Jun19.171335.4227 at news.media.mit.edu> masaru at media-lab.media.mit.edu (Masaru Sugai) writes:
>
>  This is a sort of gripe on A3070. I bought mine in April, but it turned
>out that there is few programming info in the accompanied booklet. I asked
>around on several nets when I came across several problems on trying to
>use it as a tape drive for other platform including AmigaDOS. I'm partly
>successful to use it as 150MB streamer, but I'm not sure if I really take
>advantage of maximum performance.
>
>  Some guy suggested me a possibility of undocumented dip switches and
>vendor specific SCSI commands, but I couldn't find anybody who had
>experience with CALIPER 150. I have no idea who OEMs this drive even though
>it's made in Japan! 

If the Caliper drive is truly QIC 150 compatible, it should be able to read
lower density QIC tapes automatically.  The drive itself does this by
various tricks.  The only problem might be with the mode select command,
which probably defaults to the QIC 150 density on power-up.  Even though
the drive can read the tape, it may not pass the data along until you
choose the proper density via the mode select command.  Unfortunately, I
don't have my SCSI spec handy, so I can't tell you what the correct value
would be.  Also, I believe Caliper is owned by Sanyo or Sankyo or a company
of a similar name in Japan.