I'd be interested in access to real drives capable of reading real tapes, to get archival data off my tapes. And, DAT format.
If the emulation aides in FPGA or small device coding to make modern interface bindings to older devices and so drops the entry cost to get an older SCSI or firewire drive working, I'd be delighted.
If this is emulation of the command set aimed at "driving" a software emulated tape drive, It's for another purpose. It won't help me recover old media.
(cheapskate: there are competent, expensive companies which specialise in this kind of data recovery. The problem is cost/benefit, not actual capability at any price)
It removes the fun of figuring things out by yourself and the learning how to learn things. Also the lower complexity these systems usually have vs what we use today.
I don’t see the appeal either, but perhaps the person using takes something else from their retrocomputing use.
Then so do emulators, flash drives instead of 1541's, etc. Nobody forces you to use generative models to get older hardware to do its thing, you're still free to try to get the actual hardware to run, free to build interfaces to get QIC drives connected to whatever you want them connected to, etc.
If the emulation aides in FPGA or small device coding to make modern interface bindings to older devices and so drops the entry cost to get an older SCSI or firewire drive working, I'd be delighted.
If this is emulation of the command set aimed at "driving" a software emulated tape drive, It's for another purpose. It won't help me recover old media.
(cheapskate: there are competent, expensive companies which specialise in this kind of data recovery. The problem is cost/benefit, not actual capability at any price)
I don’t see the appeal either, but perhaps the person using takes something else from their retrocomputing use.