Roger Ivie drunkenly mumbled...
> 
> The VS2000 has a monochrome framebuffer on the motherboard. Pull the
> color card from the VS2000 and you've turned it into a monochrome 2000.

ok, so i can safely pull it. (if i get the case apart enough to, have it
apart enough to clean some of the gigantic dust balls out of some of the
dust collecting spots.  what about remapping video RAM? a headless machine
with a monochrome framebuffer and a color framebuffer has lots of extra
RAM laying around that should really be remapped.  is this possible? or will
this require major rewritting of the kernel?

> It is possible to force a 2000 to use a serial console without mucking about
> with jumpers on the motherboard (which I never managed to find, anyway; not
> that I looked hard).

well, looking at the naked VS2000 motherboard i have here i only found three
jumpers and it took some looking to find them.

> The 2000 has four serial ports: the 25-pin comm port, the 9-pin printer port,
> and two ports on the 15-pin video port for the mouse and keyboard. Normally,
> to connect a printer to the 9-pin printer port you use a BCC05 cable. If you
> use a BCC08 cable, the 2000 will use the 9-pin port as its console. The
> BCC08 shorts pins 8 and 9 of the 9-pin port together to signal it should be
> used as a console. The other interesting pins on the 9-pin port are:
> 
> 	1 - Shield GND
> 	2 - Transmitted data
> 	3 - Received data
> 	7 - Signal GND

i have a HP dumb terminal someone gave me, all i need to do is short out pins
8 & 9 on the printer port and wire 1, 2, 3 & 7 the the correct place on the
terminal and i'll have a console?  that would be great since the two sun3
machines i got are much farther from working than the vax is.

[other ports stuff filed away for future reference]

> It is possible (if you have the connectors lying around) to build cables to

if i own equipment like this you should automatically be able to assume i own
the assorted crap to build stuff like this. :)

> break out the serial ports without needing the DEC box. I've done so on
> 2000s and 3100/30s to allow four terminals on the systems under VMS.

cool, i don't care to buy/find something i could build with junk i have laying
around. :)  would NetBSD allow such a thing as well? four terminals would
be nice to have for all the assorted computer junkies that hang around here.
if you come early you get a nice Sparc5 to play with, if you show up late you
get a text terminal hooked to a VS-200. hmm, that could be dangerous, have
people at my house at 5am just to get on the SUN instead of being stuck with
the text terminals. :)

and now one more question about the VS-2000.  on the NetBSD web page under
supported platforms it mentions something about VS-2000 SCSI.  what is
known about this? is it built into the motherboard? is it an option? if so,
where would it go, not much in the way of expansion on these things.  anyway,
SCSI would be great since i have a 1G SCSI drive laying here that i'd like
to put on it to replace the ST251.  size and speed some to mind when i want
to replace the ST251 with a 1G SCSI. :)  there is a 50-pin internal SCSI socket
shapped thing, is that the SCSI??

thanks,

-wonko