On March 6, you wrote:
> I did get my hands on an old service manual, and it says that 'A'
> means (among other things) that the machine is looking for the
> keyboard and monitor. The machine does have a keyboard and monitor
> connections on the back. 
> 
> Any way around this? Or do I have to buy a monitor and keyboard?
> Which monitor and keyboards will work? Perhaps a ds2100 keyboard
> with adaptor? Sigh.

  A ds2100 keyboard (no adapter required) will work fine.  You need a
video/kbd cable that plugs into the back of the machine.  However,
there's a bigger issue that's both good and bad-- NetBSD currently
does not support the graphics card in that machine.  What you need to
do is crack open the back cover, identify the graphics card(s), and
remove them.  Look for the kbd/monitor connectors on the back and
trace their cabling back to a board in the system.  It'll either be a
vcb01 (mono, one board) or a vcb02 (accelerated color, either two or
three boards connected together with a couple of ribbon cables)...If
you crack it open and list the boards by their "M" numbers (stamped on
the metal spine facing you) starting with the M7606 (the cpu), I'll
try to identify them for you and tell you what to put where after you
pull out the graphics board(s).

  Now...See that db9 connector near the diag display?  That's a
console port.  Find a terminal and a db9-db25 adapter.  The little
9-25 adapters that come with modems work fine, that's what I
use..provided you can find one of the right sex.  After we get the
graphics cards pulled, fire it up with that terminal on the console
port and we'll see how far we can get.


                         -Dave McGuire
                          mcguire@digex.net