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162 comments
Pete / Syllopsium replied to Tube🍂Time

@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?

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

well, it tries to boot from the CDROM but suffers a BAD TRAP. not sure why, maybe i need to update the IDPROM contents.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

yeah i am guessing the machine type in the IDPROM is invalid so the installer runs the wrong code.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

wrote a little FORTH program to update the contents of the IDPROM, and it looks like it has a valid host id now.

Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm) replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime ahh!! Boosted because of #Forth! Haven’t thought about it for a long time. Used to use it a bunch a long time ago. Once had a function named “exist”, later wrote a loop: “do I exist” … Simple pleasures.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

forgot to add that i needed to do a "set-defaults" and a "setenv diag-switch? false"

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

uh oh, RAM parity error. i'm hoping U676 isn't seated all the way and that it is an easy fix.

Darren replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

that did the trick. the SIMM sockets were very stuck. welcome to S O L A R I S!

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

Chris Gerhard :bt: replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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 / 🤔

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-f

/dev/rdsk/c5t1d0s2 replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime damn, I wonder if it’s some kind of Mac-compatibility that’s breaking on SPARC?

Xenotar replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime Try NetBSD, it can give better diagnostic messages, I think

Poul-Henning Kamp replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime

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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

djb_rh replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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?

🇺🇦 haxadecimal replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.

Norman Wilson replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime Did spinning Rust make things Go?

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Tube🍂Time

I imaged the drive using the ZuluSCSI initiator mode, but even with the ZuluSCSI the firmware refuses to boot from SCSI ID0. weird.

Brian Danger Hicks replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime the one part of the spinning rust drive you didn't want it to emulate

sam :pizza_pineapple: replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime might not be helpful, as it’s a fairly different machine, but I recently watched this video of someone getting a SPARCclassic up and running off a bluescsi v1, and they seemed to have a good reason to use scsi id 3 youtu.be/SMz2y-wdbzs

Norman Wilson replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime I have a vague memory of some early Sun stuff usurping SCSI ID 0, but can't recall the details.

hayalci replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime ah it's great to see that lovely console font again.

yakkoj 🦊 replied to Tube🍂Time

@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!)

Eric Carroll replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime
It has been years since I last saw
le0 no carrier log messages.

Thanks for that!

Emelia/Emi replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime fun, will probably have to do something similar to get my flea market find (a SparcStation IPX) running, turns out the console cable I bought is horribly broken (it has *really* high resistance between the pins on the DB-9 and the DIN for some reason) so the console output is "absolutely mangled" to the point of regularly dropping bits. The general structure is correct, and the occasional word (SelfTest FAILED surrounded by random mojibake-looking stuff) but it's utterly unusable. I probed it on the DB-9 end and it was barely signalling at all, even with the line driver set at the full +-12v of RS232. Almost as if the cable itself is actually *broken* internally...

@tubetime fun, will probably have to do something similar to get my flea market find (a SparcStation IPX) running, turns out the console cable I bought is horribly broken (it has *really* high resistance between the pins on the DB-9 and the DIN for some reason) so the console output is "absolutely mangled" to the point of regularly dropping bits. The general structure is correct, and the occasional word (SelfTest FAILED surrounded by random mojibake-looking stuff) but it's utterly unusable. I probed...

Paul Leyland replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

yakkoj 🦊 replied to Tube🍂Time

@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!)

Mike Spooner replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime Check the RAM. Bad modules can cause the "bad trap" error in Solaris on SPARC, although other things can, too.

DELETED replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime ah the Zuluscsi

Weren't they the ones who got in a bit of hot water for basically copying the BlueSCSI design?

Tube🍂Time replied to DELETED

@DosFox i have no idea, there's way too much drama in the retrocomputing community these days

DELETED replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime hah that's true. The more expensive and desirable the computer, the more drama there is

Tube🍂Time replied to Jonathan ‘theJPster’ Pallant

@thejpster yes but these old workstations require 512 byte sectors for their cdroms in order to boot

jgeorge replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime I wonder if that would emulate an image that’s, say, 520 bytes per sector…

Kodak Tgirl 400 replied to Tube🍂Time

@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.

Tube🍂Time replied to Kodak Tgirl 400

@nkizz no termination, that is done in the VGA monitor (75 ohm)

Yves Luther replied to Tube🍂Time

@tubetime I need this board in my life. Twice. Maybe three. Where can I buy them?

Tube🍂Time replied to Yves

@yves i'll be releasing it on github soon. need to write documentation and so forth.

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