Gregory's Servercouldn't find a Sun 13W3 cable adapter so I'm doing this to get to VGA.
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175 comments
 @tubetime What you need is a Belkin F1DE083UK - adapts to a PS/2 keyboard fine, also cheap, but I had no luck with the 13W3 to VGA connector - needed a separate adapter for that. There's also the Raritan APSSUN which may work better but was too expensive to ship to the UK, but not a problem for you?  four months later :blobsweats: i made the Video Snake Oil board that can adapt 13W3 (any type!) to VGA. you just wire up the little pads to whatever your machine needs. i've also installed a ZuluSCSI. this neat little board is a lot cheaper than a SCSI2SD. i'm going to try and install Solaris using a CDROM ISO file. CD6_512.iso is placed on the SD card. it'll be ID 6, 512 bytes per sector. well, it tries to boot from the CDROM but suffers a BAD TRAP. not sure why, maybe i need to update the IDPROM contents. yeah i am guessing the machine type in the IDPROM is invalid so the installer runs the wrong code. wrote a little FORTH program to update the contents of the IDPROM, and it looks like it has a valid host id now. forgot to add that i needed to do a "set-defaults" and a "setenv diag-switch? false" uh oh, RAM parity error. i'm hoping U676 isn't seated all the way and that it is an easy fix. @tubetime I like how "WARNING" is all caps and "panic" is kept on the down-low with no caps. I guess 'panic' has another meaning than what is coming to mind. that did the trick. the SIMM sockets were very stuck. welcome to S O L A R I S! spoke too soon. another parity error, this time at U677. why there? because that's where i moved the module that was at U676. think i will just pull that bank of RAM for now. @tubetime you just need to port solaris 10 to it and then as long as the memory error is not in kernel memory the process would be killed and the location blacklisted. it seems to run with 12MB RAM. no more parity errors this time. but now the installer hates my SCSI drive (a ZuluSCSI). filesystem creation failed for / 🤔 i bet it is this issue. basically the ZuluSCSI returns values for disk geometry that somehow confuses the Solaris partition tool. one solution is to use a real SCSI hard drive and then dd it over to the ZuluSCSI once the install is completed. https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/discussions/122#discussioncomment-4418076 @tubetime damn, I wonder if it’s some kind of Mac-compatibility that’s breaking on SPARC?  Many years ago I wrote a little tool called "scsi-ping" which gives you a working disktab entry for a SCSI disk. It's still out there somewhere. zululog.txt has the smoking gun: [996859ms] WARNING: Host used command 0x1A which is affected by drive geometry. Current settings are 63 sectors x 255 heads = 16065 but image size of 2097152 sectors is not divisible. This can cause error messages in diagnostics tools. i think the solution here is to resize the disk image file so it is divisible by 63*255*512. @tubetime This all reminds me of my days with @Migueldeicaza helping him port Linux (him the kernel, me the rest of Red Hat) to the SPARC. The hardware had some idiosyncrasies but we USUALLY found them to all have fairly good reasons. Usually. My favorite thing was getting Linux to install to one from tape. AFAIK I’m the only person to ever do that. that wasn't the solution lol :blobsweats: there's no more zululog.txt error but the superblock isn't getting written correctly. 6D B6 DB 6D is the test pattern written by the format command. could be somehow corrupting it during the write? @tubetime this FF is suspiciously looking like high-Z.  @tubetime 6D B6 DB is a worst-case test pattern for MFM encoding, so the NAND flash chips in your SD card must not have enough timing margin for the channel code. well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.  spinning rust refuses to boot when the SCSI ID is set to 0. I can set it to 1 and it will boot partway but the fstab is configured for 0 so it won't work. I imaged the drive using the ZuluSCSI initiator mode, but even with the ZuluSCSI the firmware refuses to boot from SCSI ID0. weird.  @tubetime also you're more brave than I would be. I'd install SunOS 4, especially with only 12MB RAM. (I ran Solaris 2.5.1 back in the day, but it was on sun4u machines with at least 128MB RAM!)  @tubetime owo... i hope you saw @ncommander 's #Solaris livestreams... @tubetime Thanks for that! @tubetime Brings back happy memories. Should get my pizza box SparcStation out of the loft and see if it still works. Was running RH Linux last time it was fired up because I didn't have Sloaris installation media. @tubetime I had to do this for my lunchbox machines (an IPX and an LX) But for my Sun Blade 100, I had to do a whole different thing to recover the IDPROM of the three machines, only the IPX got a modern IDPROM replacement. The others have CR2032s with holders hacked in. :o( (though not the Duct Tape Special you had!)  @tubetime Check the RAM. Bad modules can cause the "bad trap" error in Solaris on SPARC, although other things can, too. @tubetime ah the Zuluscsi Weren't they the ones who got in a bit of hot water for basically copying the BlueSCSI design? @DosFox i have no idea, there's way too much drama in the retrocomputing community these days @tubetime hah that's true. The more expensive and desirable the computer, the more drama there is  @thejpster yes but these old workstations require 512 byte sectors for their cdroms in order to boot  @tubetime I wonder if that would emulate an image that’s, say, 520 bytes per sector… @tubetime This inspires me - I have a VAXStation that uses a 3W3 video output (basically 13W3 without the digital pins) and it's impossible to find cables for it, but there are connectors for it around Do you do any termination or anything active on the board? I've made an RGB port adapter before and got pretty bad ringing, but it could definitely just be the monitor I used since I had no other way of testing. @nkizz no termination, that is done in the VGA monitor (75 ohm) @tubetime I need this board in my life. Twice. Maybe three. Where can I buy them? @yves i'll be releasing it on github soon. need to write documentation and so forth. @tubetime Does that work ok on a multi-sync monitor without sync-on-green?  @tubetime oh THAT might explain the ghosting in the screenshot i saw first 😱 @tubetime I haven't seen a 13W3 cable in a long time! That is quite a project! @tubetime Fantastic. Reminds me of the bare wire ends that I Scotch-taped into my Sega Saturn's video out port 20 years ago... but *significantly* more professional. @tubetime You only need the RGB if your display does sync-on-green. This is why I have a bunch of NEC LCD1990SX, they do sync-on-green and support a 1:1 aspect ratio in addition to stretching to fill the screen. @tubetime I have a few original Sun cables. Do you still need one? Free but P&P extra. I'm in the UK. |
well it found the keyboard!