In message <199702221558.IAA26149@information-retrieval.village.org> "Chris. Rupnik" writes:
: Hi
:  I have just bought one of the mips magnum pc-50s that were sold
:  by http://www.onsale.com but have not bought the $315 video card
:  needed by the machine. The magnum can be booted in either big-endian
:  or little endian mode. The big-endian mode has a serial console
:  mode so that it can bypass the need for this video card.
: 
:  Will the netbsd port be big or little endian?

Right now the only working NetBSD port is the pmax port and it is
little endian.  The OpenBSD arc port is also little endian, but its
support of magnums is nonexistant (there are one or two places where
the right case statement has been added to the switch statement, but
there are a bunch more where it hasn't).  The ARC based machines are
all little endian, by definition, (although some can be run in big
endian mode too).  Currently, the NetBSD/pica port doesn't compile
(well, as of the last time I tried it) and it would take a lot to get
it to compile when last I looked, let alone work.  I would imagine
that merging the OpenBSD arc stuff into the tree would be a doable
project.

Without the video card, I'm not sure what the status of things are.  I
run my Deskstation rPC44 (also not based on the magnum design, btw)
with an S3-928 based ISA card.

As far as I know, the Magnum PC-50 is a R4400PC (or R4000PC) based
system that is fairly well documented (or was).  The Microsoft Jazz
was a repackaged magnum, as was the ACER-PICA and some other early
designs for MIPS arc systems.  Some of the later ones departed from
this design (I believe the Nkk R4700 machine is fairly different), but
this is the hardware reference for the early Windows NT work.

Warner