cinnabar¶

cinnabar shows a QIC tape the way the drive saw it. It opens a raw flux capture or a tape image in a window and draws one track at a time, segment by segment, as a stack of lanes, like a logic analyzer with protocol decoders.

Where it sits¶

tw dump --> TWRF --> tw convert --> TWTI/TWTZ --> qicsilver extract --> TWVL --> qicsilver tar
              \                        /
               `---- cinnabar --------'

cinnabar reads through the same libraries as the rest of the pipeline, so what it labels is what qicsilver reads. Use it to see why a segment did not decode, to check where a volume's fields sit before writing a profile, or to compare several reads of one track. It never touches hardware, and it never writes to the files it opens.

What you can open¶

On a time axis, segments are cut at the drive's INDEX pulses. On a byte axis, each segment is one 29,696-byte slot. Either way the segment is the unit you step through.

A tape's track list holds its tracks and then its volumes. Volume N is that backup volume's decompressed byte stream, laid out the way qicsilver extract builds it, with each piece titled by the tape segment it came from. On a flux capture the volumes appear once track 0 has decoded far enough to identify the tape.

Captures whose header names no track (track -1, a probe that did not seek) appear together as Unknown track, each capture one of its passes.

A TWVL file cannot be opened.

Synopsis¶

cinnabar [OPTIONS] PATH

From the repository root:

uv run --project packages/cinnabar cinnabar captures/NAME.twtz

Options¶

The volume-read options are the same flags, with the same words, as qicsilver's, so the viewer labels a tape exactly as qicsilver extract with the same flags would read it.

The window¶

From top to bottom:

• Toolbar: Open, Stop or Resume, previous and next segment, zoom, fit, the Track and Pass selectors, Wide lanes, and lane height.
• Ruler: the axis, in seconds or bytes, with the segment's title.
• Lanes: one row per decoder output. See Lanes.
• Track strip: the whole track as a shade strip over a bar of segment states (clean, corrected, uncorrectable, missing, bad), with the viewed window drawn on it. Drag the window to scrub, or click anywhere to jump.
• Status bar: what the cursor is on, and how far decoding has got.

The Details panel docks on the right. While nothing is selected it shows what the tape's header says (name, format, geometry, volumes), which volume profile read the volume table, its score and parser, and any warnings on that reading in amber (low-confidence, no-parser, untested, manual and others). Click a span or a byte and it shows that item's decoded fields and a colour-coded hex dump of its bytes. You can float or close the panel; View > Details brings it back.

Export bytes¶

The Details panel and the File menu export bytes to a file:

• Export selected bytes writes the bytes of the clicked span. On a volume track, clicking a file's data entry and exporting writes that file.
• Export segment bytes writes the whole segment. On a segment that has them, you can choose the 29 data sectors, as an image holds them, or all 32 sectors including the error-correction parity. Sectors that were never read come out as zeros, so offsets in the file match offsets in the segment.

Examples¶

Open a tape image:

cinnabar captures/NAME.twtz

Open a dump directory of flux captures:

cinnabar captures/NAME/

Open the third read of track 5:

cinnabar captures/NAME/ --track 5 --pass 3

Open volume 0's decompressed stream:

cinnabar captures/NAME.twtz --volume 0

Print segment 5 of track 2 as text, for use over SSH or in a script:

cinnabar captures/NAME.twtz --dump --track 2 --segment 5

Render a screenshot of segment 0 of track 0 in the dark theme:

cinnabar captures/NAME.twtz --screenshot track0.png --theme dark

The text dump¶

--dump prints the tape's rows (header, volume profile, warnings), then the track: one line per segment with its range and state, a flux count per segment for a capture, then every span in every row, then the byte count. It never loads Qt, so it works without a display. On a flux capture it waits for the whole track to decode before printing.

Exit status¶

0 on success. 1 when the file cannot be opened or its volume table cannot be read. 2 for a usage error, such as a --track or --pass the tape does not have.

See also¶

• Lanes
• Passes and merged reads
• Themes and settings
• cinnabar for developers
• TWS-1 TWRF and TWS-2 TWTI/TWTZ