Tube🌿Timewelp, how'd i get into THIS situation? let's rewind...
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.
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.
four months later 
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 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.
that did the trick. the SIMM sockets were very stuck. welcome to S O L A R I S!
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.
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 / 🤔
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.
https://github.com/ZuluSCSI/ZuluSCSI-firmware/discussions/122#discussioncomment-4418076
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.
that wasn't the solution lol 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?
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?
well, I broke down and put in a spinning rust disk. the installer is much happier now and is copying files.
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.
I imaged the drive using the ZuluSCSI initiator mode, but even with the ZuluSCSI the firmware refuses to boot from SCSI ID0. weird.
so i tried placing a drive image at SCSI ID 3 and *it boots as SD(0,0,0)vmunix* wtaf lol. seems like Sun cheated and swizzled some SCSI IDs around.
Fritz Adalis
Brian Danger Hicks@tubetime the one part of the spinning rust drive you didn't want it to emulate
sam@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 https://youtu.be/SMz2y-wdbzs
SAVING a 30-year old Sun workstation! - ISP Series Episode 2
While we may have left on a cliffhanger in our first ISP episode, this might be our most extensive video to date. We get up close with the SPARCclassic, and ...
Emelia/Emi@samedwards @tubetime Annecdata: My IPX has the original spinning rust set to ID 3 with termination off, although I can't check anything else because I don't have a working console at the moment.
Norman Wilson@tubetime I have a vague memory of some early Sun stuff usurping SCSI ID 0, but can't recall the details.
@tubetime
Is the scsi controller set to id 0?
Is the scsi controller set to id 0?
@tubetime
Also check termination, you should have exactly two. (Not sure if you've used narrow scsi or not, sorry if you know this already.)
Also check termination, you should have exactly two. (Not sure if you've used narrow scsi or not, sorry if you know this already.)
hayalci@tubetime ah it's great to see that lovely console font again.
Michael Thompson@tubetime Isn't the boot drive SCSI ID set to 3 on early Sun systems?
zahl@tubetime Spinning rust is a great name for a system.
@tubetime Did spinning Rust make things Go?
Nicolas Noble 
@tubetime this FF is suspiciously looking like high-Z.
🇺🇦 haxadecimal 🚫👑@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.
Insubstantial Pageant
djb_rh@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.
I love this, so I@tubetime damn, I wonder if it’s some kind of Mac-compatibility that’s breaking on SPARC?
Xenotar@tubetime Try NetBSD, it can give better diagnostic messages, I think
Poul-Henning KampMany 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.
Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven@bsdphk @tubetime From your FreeBSD homepage:
scsi-ping Has taken a life of its own, I don't administrate any Solaris hosts these days, so I can't help you figure out what to do about your disktab. The most recent version I know about is here: ftp://ftp.cdf.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/scsiping
Edit: since that led nowhere, here's a working URL: https://www.cs.toronto.edu/pub/jdd/scsiping/
yakkoj 🦊
Chris Gerhard 
@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.
Kevin Karhan 
@tubetime owo...
i hope you saw @ncommander 's #Solaris livestreams...
Darren@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.
Eric Carroll@tubetime
It has been years since I last saw
le0 no carrier log messages.
Thanks for that!
Stephen Bannasch (316 ppm)@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 ;-)
Chris L@stepheneb @tubetime yeah forth is so easy to bootstrap. I think I had a small forth-ish for 6502 based on reading about it in Byte. I was so happy when Apple and Sun bundled forth as boot loaders. Also tube time should do a Sun 4/260. That was my first Unix machine, got surplus and loaded it down with internet software in mid 90s. The lights flickered when it powered on.
@stepheneb @tubetime ahh GraForth! That concept hasn’t been active in my brain for decades, and all I can concretely remember is a feeling of happiness and a love of parabolas and hyperbolas.
@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!)
Mike Spooner@tubetime Check the RAM. Bad modules can cause the "bad trap" error in Solaris on SPARC, although other things can, too.
Jonathan ‘theJPster’ Pallant@tubetime Doesn't ISO9660 use 2048 byte sectors?
@thejpster yes but these old workstations require 512 byte sectors for their cdroms in order to boot
Rob Isaac@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.
Mᴀʀᴋ VᴀɴᴅᴇWᴇᴛᴛᴇʀɪɴɢ@tubetime I'm having flashbacks to the early 1990s.
Pete / Syllopsium@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?
John Wilson@tubetime that font is giving me flashbacks