[SunRescue] Odd Sbus card...

[Greg A. Woods]

[ On Monday, August 30, 1999 at 06:46:36 (-0700), Ed.Mitchell at centigram.com wrote: ]
> Subject: [SunRescue] Odd Sbus card...
>
> Sbus card, single width from an SS1 -- it has a single 9-pin connector on
> the back(same basica shape as an SVGA connector, but with only 9 pin holes
> aka it's a female connector)...the biggest chip on the board itself is from
> LSIL(LSI Logic, I'll presume) and has some markings on it and the word
> "Video".  Deduction leads me to think this is some type of video card, but
> does anyone know what type and what exactly I can plug into it?  I've got a
> couple of them that I received with some older SS1's and an SS1 Sunar
> clone.(cute box! hehe).

It's probably a hi-res bwtwo framebuffer just like the one I'm using
under NetBSD in this sparc-1 I use as my main workstation every day:

    bwtwo0 at sbus0 slot 1 offset 0x0: SUNW,501-1419, 1600 x 1280 (console)
    bwtwo0: attached to /dev/fb

I don't remember what mine actually looks like, and I'm not in mood to
clean off all the junk off my monitor and heave it off to have a peek!  ;-)

You may, or may not, find the 501-1419 number (or another 501* number
that you could look up) on the card somewhere, perhaps on a bar-coded
sticker.

If it is a bwtwo then you might want to find yourself one of these 19"
hi-res monitors, especially if you want to do a lot of work with text on
a sparc workstation.  1600x1280 means I can have almost 12 24x80 xterms,
or one 76rx132c emacs window and a couple more 24x80's + sundry X things
like a clock, desktop manager, xload windows, xbiffs, cursor area, all
still visible at the same time!  The other nice thing is these monitors
are rock solid and crystal clear at 100dpi!  I've always liked big
screens for text ever since I worked on Ann-Arbour Amabassador 60line
terminals in University, and now I'm a real screen pig!  Unfortunately
these monitors are much more rare than they used to be as they
one-by-one suffer various forms of hard-to-repair electronic death.
I've got several dead ones and one spare working one and I'm hoping I
can hold out until flat-panel screens of similar size and density are
affordable.

-- 
							Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098      VE3TCP      <gwoods at acm.org>      <robohack!woods>
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