Hi,

I think Colin has missed the fact that we are not dealing with a monitor,
but the actual video card on the IIcx. Remember, the IIcx is special in
that it does *not* have any internal video. It must have some type of
video card in it. I don't see anyway around this. You could buy a really
cheap used video card to pop into the IIcx just to boot it.  Then, the
paperclip trick should work. Personally, I use a Mac <-> VGA adapter on my
Centris 650, just in case I want to plug in a monitor to see what's going
on.

Mark

On Thu, 1 Jan 1998, Colin Wood wrote:

> Armen Babikyan wrote:

> > I just took apart my IIvx to use one of it's video cards in my IIcx, which
> > i just installed NetBSD on.  I set the machine to auto-boot itself and set
> > up it's ethernet and stuff.  However, I really would like to put the video
> > card back in the IIvx, and the keyboard/mouse belongs to one of my other
> > computers.  I just attempted to boot the IIcx headless (and
> > video-cardless) and mouse/keyboard-less, and it doesn't seem to even be
> > booting up the MacOS (no noise from disk drive).
> 
> Unfortunately, this won't work at the moment under NetBSD.  The older
> II-series machines (the ones with dirty ROM's) appear to have problems
> booting without a keyboard and mouse connected.  I know where the problem
> is, but I just don't know why.  To work around this, you'd either need a
> kernel with HWDIRECT ADB support, else compile ADB support out of the
> kernel completely (I'm not sure what this would break, if anything, tho).
>  
> > Can this machine be booted this way? or does some hardware limitation
> > prevent this machine from working with this configuration?
> 
> I don't know of any reason why MacOS would refuse to boot, but if you look
> in the FAQ, I think there is a Q&A about booting headless.  I believe a
> paperclip is all you need to do it the somewhat unsafe way (well, I don't
> know that it's unsafe, but shorting pins with a paperclip just seems a
> little kludgey to me ;-)

   Mark Andres               E-mail: mark@giganet.net
          Running NetBSD, 100% Microsoft Free!
   Me & NetBSD: http://www2.giganet.net/~mark/NetBSD/