Mastodawn

Brian Swetland Mar 17, 2023

Well, the bad news is the old 170MB drive looks like it might be toast. The good news is the BeMachine still powers up okay and thanks to HDD images online, I was able to get it booting using a BlueSCSIv2 SCSI sdcard interface. Now I need to scare up an AT keyboard and PS2 (or maybe serial? I remember using a serial mouse with this thing, no idea if PS2 works) mouse.

#retrocomputing #BeMachine

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Michael Engel Mar 17, 2023

@swetland Ah, what a pity about the hard drive 🙁. Could you please record a video of the screen output during system bootup (if there is anything to see before the UI comes up)? That might help emulator developers - the messages I can see in BillBe are all printed on the UART, there's no emulation of the Trident graphics card so far.

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Brian Swetland Mar 18, 2023

@me_ Here's a shot of what the boot rom displays on power up. The screen blanks when the OS boots and then you get the graphical interface a few seconds later. I haven't scared up an RS232 converter to take a look at serial output yet.

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Michael Engel

@swetland Thanks a lot! This looks like messages from the firmware ROM - the emulator doesn't emulate the firmware so far (I don't think there's an image of the ROM available), so it seems that all output of the kernel before switching to the graphical interface is printed on the UART, which is already emulated.