[doodlebugging]

The geophysical industry used 9-tracks for a long time and there are still services that will recover your legacy tapes and reformat to any modern output.

I have never used these guys, OnTrack(0), but they claim to do 9-track recovery.

Everything we did in the industry for decades lived on 9-track tapes. EBCDIC headers are a standard feature of SEG-Y output datasets.

Here is one who deals with geophysical data, Data Strategies Interchange(1).

[0] (https://www.ontrack.com/en-us/tape-services)

[1] (https://go-dsi.com/seismic-data-transcription/)

Good luck. Sounds like a fun project. I wrote a SEGD/SEGY reader for geophysical data a long time ago using tcl/tk. It was surprisingly easy. It used data from disk files though. I got rid of my SCSI 8mm and DLT drives a long time ago and went to pure disk IO. No more issues spinning tapes after that. In the industry though we did have some really good tape reading/writing/checking routines. Haven't done that since the mid-90's myself.