Re: New to this hardware

[Chris Hanson <cmhanson%eschatologist.net@localhost>]

On Feb 17, 2026, at 4:29 PM, McGrude <mcgrude%gmail.com@localhost> wrote:
> 
> For disk(s) I intended to us a ZuluSCSI sd card scsi emulator I have one hand.
> For PSU I am going to use an ATX power supply with a break out board
> to get easy access to +5, +12, -12 to power the backplane.

First, get the docs for the boards you have, they're on Bitsavers. Having Motorola BUG ROMs is good because they're pretty comprehensive in their support for booting from a variety of media. According to the docs on Bitsavers it does look like the 162 will support your 712M transition module.

Having the correct documentation for your board and configuring your board properly with the various DIP switches and jumpers is *critical*. You may not damage anything otherwise, but you may also not be able to do much of anything with that board either. (I have a pile of i860 boards that I hope to someday find docs for…)

Second, ensure your ATX supply can actually provide enough power on *all* of the rails. As the world moved away from 5V TTL to 3.3V to 1.8V etc., power supplies moved away with it. I have some Meanwell supplies to specifically meet the V/A requirements for my VME gear.

Third, you're probably going to have an easier time with the MVME177 than the 162 when it comes to NetBSD; the 1x7 boards are more general-purpose while the 1x2 boards are more self-contained embeddable controllers. I'm not sure what NetBSD's 1x2 support is like, the 177 is definitely supported though as I've run NetBSD on mine.

Finally, don't worry too much about SCSI (at least at first) since you have other NetBSD and Linux systems and experience netbooting UNIX systems. Netbooting something like the MVME177 is actually quite convenient: Paging over Ethernet isn't really any slower than paging to a supported SCSI disk, and you can also have the console serial port connected to aa host so you can even do things like drop to 177Bug by sending a BREAK signal, which will let you remote-reboot in case of a panic/hang/etc.

What I've generally done with mine is set up the board according to the manual in something close to its default configuration, boot to 177Bug and use the configuration commands to set the NVRAM configuration to its defaults, and then use 177Bug to netboot NetBSD. From there it's "just" NetBSD.

  -- Chris

PS - I'd start with either NetBSD 11 since RC1 just came out, or NetBSD CURRENT, because there have been lots of 68K improvements in both. The improvements in CURRENT are more extensive (and therefore riskier) but sometimes that's part of the fun!