On 2004-09-21 adrian@close.wattle.id.au wrote:

> So, I have an old Sharp HC-4500A.  Its touchscreen is malfunctioning so
> it's largely useless for WinCE, but it does have a usable keyboard and a
> serial port, so I figured it'd make a great portable router console.
>
> Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to want to do any more than make weird
> noises after I use pbsdboot1.exe to load the kernel.  The screen doesn't
> blank or otherwise change - just the "Loading" dialog at 100%.

 The only thing I can think of for the wierd noises is that once when
booting my Clio the boot happend right when a sound effect was being
played and left the speaker on and playing whatever noise appeared, which
had the fun effect of letting me hear the system working.  I have seen a
freeze as you describe on a Pen Centra 200 (3922 CPU).  I tried with both
pbsdboot and hpcboot, both serial and display console.  At least in
hpcboot (I don't remember about pbsdboot, but I think it was similar) it
gets to jumping to the second stage boot blocks, but dies before blanking
the screen.  The only time I sucessfully booted this machine was with
1.5Y.  I did not yet try adding something at the kernel entry to see if it
gets that far (I think it should be possible to blink the LEDs at that
point by directly writing to the appropriate memory locations).

Matthew Orgass
darkstar@city-net.com