Brian Kendig writes:
> I reinstalled ALL of the binaries (whew!), and now I get a '#' prompt on my
> IIvx, but Brad, you were right -- just as you expected, my keyboard doesn't
> work, so I'm dead in the water at that point.
> Has anyone else gotten around this problem?

The reason the keyboard (and mouse and real-time clock) probably
won't work in both the IIvx and IIsi is that they both have (I'm
guessing on the vx) a chip to handle both the ADB and parameter RAM.
This is not just a matter of a small fix or a tweak; I (we) have no
idea how to get at the thing.  Apple was at least nice enough to say
that the ADB microcontroller is a custom Motorola 68HC05, for which I
have ordered the documentation.  Ditto for the Mitsubishi
microcontroller in the portable Macs, which handles the serial chip
power, all the power control hardware, the ADB, and the parameter RAM.
If I CAN get it to work, Brian, I WILL.  (I'm just afraid that it will
take more time than protons decaying.)

As usual, we welcome all attempts to decode and wrangle the hardware; we'd
love to see the system run on other Macs.  It just continues to look more
and more bleak as we look at increasingly recent Macs.  It took some
SERIOUS guessing on our part to get the Mac II to work, and it has ten
times the hardware docs the Quadras have.

Still, with a little luck (and test programs to send every possible
sequence of five or less bytes to every location in I/O memory) we might
be able to figure out the Powerbooks/Duos and maybe the newer desktops.
At least porting to the 68040 is only a matter of reading the Motorola
manuals (and a few late-night hacking sessions deteriorating into stupid
jokes and lots of unstoppable laughter.)

Just so everyone knows what I know, I installed the tar files in
cray-ymp.acm.stuorg.vt.edu:/pub/NetBSD_Mac/Alpha2, using the MacSideUtils
in /pub/NetBSD_Mac, and then used /pub/NetBSD_Mac/newbooter-8k_4k, on
a clean disk, all from scratch, and it seems to work fine for me.  Of course,
I can't speak for SE/30's, IIcx's, or IIx's.  My Mac II has the original
motherboard, 8M of Ram, and is running MacBSD on a Connor 340M SCSI drive,
with a Macintosh 8-bit Video Card.  The most heinous bug I encountered was
that I had to click the "SCSI 2" button from Mkfs, even though it was
highlighted.  (An uninitialized variable tried to read SCSI 0.)  Maybe that
will help someone.

Please bear with us in this time of disorder (as if it was different from
any other), as some of us are returning from vacations, and Mike was and
Allen is on site for their REAL jobs, thus unable to provide MacBSD tech
support.  (I don't suppose anyone would like to donate full-time
salaries for a few months??)  I think we're on the verge of getting our
act together, but, as always, we can only ask everyone to keep giving
us all the feedback they can and we'll do our best to respond in a
helpful way.

	-Brad "No, MacBSD probably won't run on an Apple IIgs." G.

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