[rescue] Sun 3/50 BTW (and Sun 2 keyboard)

[Jon]

On 26 February 2018 at 22:26, Ian Finder <ian.finder at gmail.com> wrote:

> Earl, et. al, a few questions-
>
> 1) Can the 1600x1200 Sun B&W ECL monitor, which is what I appear to have,
> work with the Sun 2/120
>

Hello,

It should work with at least one of the monochrome Sun 2/120 framebuffers.
The Sun Hardware Reference ( http://www.sunhelp.org/faq/sunref3.html )
says the 501-1003 only supports TTL but I don't believe this is true
because I
have that board and it can be jumpered for either TTL or ECL.
Don't know about the 501-1052 board the reference claims supports both
TTL and ECL. Maybe that's true or maybe they mixed up the two?

2) Does anyone know common causes for the monitor in (1) to dim?
> 3) Does anyone have the pinouts for the mythical type 2 <-> type 3 keyboard
> & mouse passive adapter? I would like to construct one.
>

Since I'm in the same situation as you regarding a severe lack of type-2
keyboard I'm planning on doing this as well.
No pinout for the official adapter, but the pinout for the 501-1003 board
can be
found in the schematics in the engineering manual at:
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/sun/sun2/800-1187-01_2-120_Video_Board_Engr_Sep84.pdf
Page 19, connectors J1900 & J1901. Pinout for type-3 can be found at:
http://www.hardwarebook.info/SUN_Keyboard/Mouse


> 4) Does anyone have a spare VME framebuffer for a 3/260, and a spare sun 3
> mouse?
>



> 5) What's the best way to do a SunOS 3 install without employing the use of
> a tape drive?
>

If you have the SCSI board, I would try to hook up a SCSI drive to another
Sun machine (probably a sun-3 with Sun UNIX 3.x because the filesystem
might have changed) and get the miniroot etc onto the drive from there and
then move the drive back try to boot and install.
I don't have the SCSI board (it seems to be very rare indeed) but I do have
a Xylogics 450(?) board to interface with an SMD drive.

I suppose the above scheme would work with an SMD drive as well as long
as you have another Sun machine with SMD support, which I don't.
But I do have an ethernet board so I've been unsuccessfully trying to do a
network install. Something goes wrong very early and I can't even get the
diag to transfer beyond a few bytes.
The problem could either be with the sun-2 ethernet board or, as I'm hoping,
something wrong with the netbsd/modern network I'm trying to boot from.
My current plan is to get a Sunos3 installation (need ND support to netboot
sun 2/120, support removed in 4.x!) onto one of my sun-3 machines and
maybe that will work better for netbooting since age difference is much
less...

Lastly (might as well take this chance to beg), I only have 1MB of RAM in
my sun-2 which restricts me to running only Sun's 1.x releases (and with
a shoehorn), if I ever get past the install issue.
Guess no one happens to have some spare RAM board they're willing to
let go to a good home? With compensation? ^_^

- Jon