On Fri, 18 Oct 1996, Greg Earle wrote:

> (1) Right now my hoary old SPARCstation 1 clone here has a nice Sony GDM 20D10
>     monitor on it (bog-standard Sun 20" Sony with the little remote control
>     unit tucked under the middle, and the built-in 13W3 cable/connector).
>     Is there a prayer in hell that this could be re-used?  Or does one have to
>     buy a bog-standard PC variety Multisync monitor to use with the TGA fb?

I played with hooking Sun monitors to my UDB with minimal success.  The 
closest I got was with the Sony 19" (Sun model #365-1160).  With this 
monitor, I got 1152x900 working OK under XFree86 (I need to tweak timings 
a smidgeon, but it's pretty nice!).  To hook the Sony to the UDB, I 
bought a 13W3 female to VGA male converter from Access Development, part 
#1396.  Here's a summary of problems I encountered and my theories on them:
	*  Couldn't get any of the 17" monitors I tried to work at 
	1152x900 (note: this is the resolution to go with, since 
	basically all Sun monitors will support 1152x900 with 61.8 Khz.
	horiz. sync, and 66Hz. vert. refresh, and you can drive this with
	a TGA).
	*  Couldn't get the Sony 16" monitor (365-1151) to work, either.
	I think part of the problem may be how the monitor detects which
	mode to use?  There's a mention in the Sun hardware faq (and this
	may be dated info), that Sun monitors use 3 pins of the 13W3
	connector as mode sense bits.  Of course, the adapter I bought
	can't know what resolution the TGA is at, and set/clear these
	bits appropriately!  If I had the time/inclination, I guess I
	could try hacking my own 13W3-to-VGA adapter, and forcibly set
	the mode-sense pins to 1152x900 mode.
	*  Even with the 19" monitor that worked, text mode does not work.
	This is about the place I gave up and hooked up a PC monitor.  :)
	I was going to play with the jumpers on the UDB's board that set
	the video mode under ARC, and see if that would change anything,
	but the jumpers aren't marked on the board!  So I had no idea what
	to change.  In light of this, what you would have to do to make the
	UDB "usable" on the 19" would be to run Xdm, since X does work.

> (2) I have two 1.2 Gb Quantum ProDrive PD1225S 3.5" disks.  Can I use these,
>     either internally (i.e., put one inside) or both externally?  What little
>     familiarity I have with the Alpha port keeps mentioning "RZ25 disk images".
> 
>     Do I have to scrounge up an RZ25 from someplace, no matter what?  And "dd"
>     the disk image to it, perhaps while attached to a computer at work, and
>     then install it in the UDB/Multia long enough to get it up and running
>     and transferred over to the existing 1.2 Gb disks?

(I saw you already got a good answer about the disks...)

> (3) If you don't have the "special breakout cable" for the dual-function DB25
>     RS-232 port, will it still work with a "regular" cable?  Sun has some
>     similar systems (i.e. that also take a breakout cable into 2 DB25's), but
>     one can use a normal straight-through cable to use the single "A" port.

Yes, like the Suns, a "normal" cable will give you acess to the 
first port.

> (4) Commodity 72-pin 70 ns RAM, right?

Yep...


good luck,
Jonathan