Hello,

okay, i aquired a DECsystem 5500 at eBay now. After fixing a burned operator
panel, this thing seems to work nice. But i saw an _EXTREMELY_ perverted
curiosity:

Trying to boot Ultrix/RISC: ?FILESTRUCT somewhat
Trying to boot NetBSD/pmay: ?FILESTRUCT somewhat

Okay. I know this message from a VAX trying to boot from a non-FILES11-disc.
So i thought: okay. Getting rid of this message is easy: Throw in a
FILES11-disc. The system will crash, but for testing, if my CD-ROM is okay,
this is enough. So i inserted Ultrix/VAX.

And i didn't believe it: This beast boots Ultrix/VAX!!! Extremely slow, but
boots. Okay, the kernel halts when starting, but this thing executes VAX code.
Same with VMS/VAX. It starts booting and terminaltes with %SYSBOOT-F-Unknown
Processor or so. But it executes VAX code. As a final test: Booting NetBSD/vax
on it. The bootloader display the usual text, the counter goes down, okay but
then, it fails with stray interrupts. But this is the definitive prove that a
DECsystem 5500 with a MIPS R3000 inside is capable of executing VAX code, maybe
even emulate a VAX.

So, should we, besides port-pmax, also port NetBSD/vax on this machine? Just as
a nice gag? Okay. I have the hardware now, so i will have a look into the
kernel to drive DS5500 support, according to the website, it is still in
progress. I don't know if i find the time to port NetBSD/vax on it also, but i
will have a look into NetBSD/pmax.

But, besides this funny story... Is there a way to boot the official
Ultrix/RISC from CD on this machine? "B DIA3" doesn't work, and the RZ devices
aren't recognized in several forms, but are displayed in "SHOW DEV".

...Michael

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