[Sunhelp] [Summary] SPARCstation 1+ serial/terminal problem and whats this?

[Parris B. Wood]

Hello,

	Sorry for the delay wierd Ma' Bell issues have been keeping me
anchored at work the past few days. Anyway I quickly recieved to response
within a day of posting so first off thanks to the following people for
lending me a hand:

	James Lockwood
	Paul Khoury	

	To answer the first question, the odd looking card is probally a
framebuffer as James had suggested. That was my first though but a friend
had suggested it might be a wierd serial card. It not having a 13W3
connector similar to that on the back of my Indy, I easily duped into
believing his suggestion.

	Also as James pointed out there is a serial # on the back of the
card at the SBus (I hope I'm using the right bus here) connector. Sorry
about that folks, I must have scoured the card so hard I missed the
obvious. For the curious the number is:

	5011419019838 -07REV50

	The -07 portion on a seperate sticker to the immediate right of
the serial number. Maybe this will confirm James's suggestion of its
capabilities. I doubt he is very off if at all.

>That's a clock crystal for generating the video timings.

	Makes alot of sense when put together with the previous
information.

	On to the main problem, getting output of the serial port(s). Well
taking James advice I yanked the scsi terminator and the aui adapter and
put the fb back in place and still no dice, even with the terminal program
(using tera term this time) set to the defaults for console work
(96008n1).

	I took the cable into work today to verify it was wired correctly
and everything seemed to pass. I also did the varying keyboard keys, only
L1+D got any results. They culminated with a blinking of the three leds
and a beep and then no more. Having only a Type 4 keyboard I was not able
to use Pauls suggestion of getting info from the leds on the condition of
the ram. The machine appears to be almost maxed out with one bank
completely filled with original Sun memory and the next four simms filled
with Clearpoint memory. I'd love to pull the chips to find out their size
but they are in the slots good. 

	The only things I have not tried yet are pulling the nvram chip
(I'd like to avoid that until I can grab the mac address) and placing a
hard drive in the machine to pull enough juice from the power supply as
James suggested. Placing my spare drive in the SS1+ is my next thing to
do. This brings me to my next question:

	The SS1+ has the places for drives, one is taken by the flopp, the
next spot is open but missing the mounting sled/bracket and the third has
a bracket and this wierd little board with what looks like a resistor. All
I can tell is when powered on that little resistor throws off alot of
heat, basicly untouchable. What is it? If I put a drive in the machine can
I remove this little board? Sorry, just that kind of heat worries me.

	Anyway thanks again for the suggestions.

-
Parris Wood
 pawood at vt.edu.
 pwood at wilma.widomaker.com.
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