I believe the HP 1630 tape file is slightly different than the GPIB file. Certainly the "Header" is different.
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Yes, the formats are different. There's clearly another layer of encapsulation in the tape files.
What I'm after is the yummy insides of any of these files, which is the data starting with the XX to the end of that data as indicated by the length field (immediately following the XX). That long binary string is the actual inverse assembler and can be pushed directly from the PC to the analyzer via the GPIB port in the same way as a "learn string". There's no tape, disk, or other peripheral emulation needed.
If I understand, I think you're trying to take a more indirect route of emulating a tape drive on HP-IL, putting the files in the emulator in the right format, and letting the analyzer initiate the load.
Yes, I have a National Instruments USB to GPIB adapter that I have used to capture the print output from my HP 1630A, but it does not work with the HPDISK software (unsupported) as a GPIB drive emulator. My 1630A ROMs only support HP-IL tape as a storage device to save configurations or load IA files.
The PIL-BOX ilper utility is able to emulate an HP-IL tape drive, but the HP 1630A only supports one tape drive at a time - and the IA tape COPYFILE utility only copies files to other tapes on the same tape drive.
So I have captured (with the PIL-BOX 'scope') each of the IA file contents during a copy of the entire IA file to another tape. Those IA file captures are on my zip file - edited from the PIL-BOX captures and converted from ASCII Hex characters to binary data files.
Since each of those file captures includes the entire file including the header - I'm hoping to just use the lifput utility to poke those files into the PIL-BOX LIF contents of an emulated tape, along with editing in the filename into the FILEX directory file - and see if I can use the result in my HP 1630A.
If it works - I think anyone with the 1630A or 1630D with the "tape" ROMs will be able to use a PIL-BOX to load their IA files, instead of having to buy (and possibly fix) an HP GPIB floppy drive AND upgrade their ROMs to the GPIB storage version.