[pups] extract old archive format?

I want to look in some .a files identified by file(1) as "old PDP-11 archive". Anyone know what tool I can use on a modern *BSD or Linux system to extract the files from an "old PDP-11" ar archive? GNU ar complains "File format not recognized". ar tells me: ar: supported targets: elf64-x86-64 elf32-i386 a.out-i386-netbsd coff-i386 efi-app-ia32 elf64-little elf64-big elf32-little elf32-big srec symbolsrec tekhex binary ihex netbsd-core But I have no idea how to try different targets. The GNU ar manual page doesn't tell me much. Or how can I use modern pcc or gcc to compile old pre-ansi ar.c? Any suggestions? Now I found a simtools.zip via http://simh.trailing-edge.com/ which is "a collection of tools for manipulating simulator file formats and for cross-assembling code for the PDP-1, PDP-7, PDP-8, and PDP-11." But I am not sure if this is related. On that note, any ideas how to extract files from a ".tap" file used by simh? (For now I use view or strings to look at it.) Thanks, Jeremy C. Reed echo 'EhZ[h ^jjf0%%h[[Zc[Z_W$d[j%Xeeai%ZW[ced#]dk#f[d]k_d%' | \ tr '#-~' '\-.-{'