I don't think it's been worked on for some time; We both reached the same dead end in our emulation projects - The disk images we were working from were from a crashed machine and missing most of the operating system.
No - To read the tapes in we needed the tape software and the tape software was only on the tape and not in the world loads we had. To generate a whole system from tape required TI-internal software named GENASYS, which was not released to customers. We contacted TI about this and they responded that they were actively searching for GENASYS internally at the time as they wanted to use it as prior art in some patent action. I don't remember what became of it.
