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.
Emelia/Emi@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...