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!