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welp, how'd i get into THIS situation? let's rewind...

Tube❄️Time

*earlier* what i have here is a Sun SPARCstation 1+.

it's going to need a little work but WHAT is that blob of duct tape

looks like a coin cell mod.

on the back, we have the usual semi-cursed 13W3 video connector and the Sun keyboard connector. where am i going to find a Sun keyboard?

i just happen to have one, new in box! i bought this years ago at Weird Stuff Warehouse when they were still around. i have no idea why, but i'm glad i did.

i've also got some Sun mice. an M3 and an M4.

however, they have RJ11 connectors and the keyboard (which is where the mouse plugs in) just has a mini-DIN connector. uh oh.

which brings me back to here. does this mouse, despite the connector difference, use the same protocol?

looks like it is essentially the same protocol as the version of the mouse (type 4?) designed for the SPARCstation. the output is open collector, inverted async serial, 5 byte.

time to build an adapter. the connector is RJ11 (technically 6P4C) but it has these pins sticking out, presumably so you can't plug it into a phone jack.

ahh well, i'll just file some grooves.

couldn't find a Sun 13W3 cable adapter so I'm doing this to get to VGA.

well it found the keyboard!

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 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?

@tubetime that font is giving me flashbacks

@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.

@tubetime once wrote a simple Forth-like language I called “go” written in 68000 assembler that interactively compiled lines directly to 68000 machine code. Ran on an original Mac 128k ;-)

@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 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.

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

@thejpster @tubetime One of the quirks of the early sun machines is a reliance on 512-bytes-per-sector CD-ROMs. It’s not as impossible as it sounds, because many of the contemporary SCSI CD-ROM drives also support a mode select command to enable it.

@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 @me_ Oh lord, this is great, you’re like 4 months down the road i’be just started! I do theoretically have a 13W3 monitor (untested), but need to resolve the keyboard situation. I was going to try to get a rpi’s gpio to talk the serial protocol. I love this thread!

@a for the video you can use this adapter: github.com/schlae/13W3

for the keyboard it is literally just a serial port, you could do it with an rpi or an arduino quite easily

GitHubGitHub - schlae/13W3: 13W3 Video Snake Oil13W3 Video Snake Oil. Contribute to schlae/13W3 development by creating an account on GitHub.

@delan @tubetime Oh, this looks awesome! I love that you put in stuff like the idprom macro; great touch I wouldn’t have thought of. I’d still like to get something going with the (non-pico) pi because I want to treat it as a wifi pseudo-bridge, but given how far underwater my project list is, maybe I’ll start with this.

@tubetime@mastodon.social the more i look the more i approve. imo ziptie it in place and call it done.

@tubetime Does that work ok on a multi-sync monitor without sync-on-green?

@lymenzies @tubetime IIRC it was SGI where you needed sync-on-green

@DrHyde @tubetime Good to know. I may try this hack. I do actually have one of the 13w3 to BNC adapters but have never tried to wire it to VGA.

@tubetime Laptop composite video output circa 2010

@North This is glorious, particularly the cap.

@tubetime oh THAT might explain the ghosting in the screenshot i saw first 😱

@fanf yep exactly! we don't need signal integrity for this test.

@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 Reminds me that I had a (monitor) 13W3 - VGA (computer) cable with my Sun CRT monitor in like pre-2009.

@tubetime how do you like the Saelae?