Hello,

> > What doesn't work:
> > - for some reason the Xserver hangs on exit - no idea why yet.
I fixed this :)

> > If anyone is foolhardy enough to play with it I'll tar the binaries together and make them available for download. 
> > The Xserver needs the kernel mentioned above or something newer with my changes to the pnozz driver and cg3
> > emulation disabled, it will /not/ work with stock kernels, if emulation is in place it will use the cg3 driver.

> Sure, I'll give it a shot. Is this a full release we're talking about,
> or tarballs of X and such?
Ok, so I'll make a tarball.
I built the X binaries on a -current userland I built a couple of days ago - also available on my site. So it will be a rather big download initially, but after that it would only be the (smallish) pnozz_drv.o - I'm pretty sure I don't need more changes in the rest of XFree for the near future.

> I can trivially backup/restore my sparcbook
> using an old 1 gig external sun scsi drive I've got sitting around
> somewhere. (one thing that truly amazes me... I'm used to (and
> admittedly spoiled by) SATA150 drives... hard to believe that what
> these boxes use is called "fast scsi" ;)
Well, back in the late 80s / early 90s 10MB/s /was/ blazingly fast :)

> Also, these boxes *are* technically capable of at least 16 bit color,
> right? 
Yes, the chip has full VGA compatibility and besides that it supports 8, 16 and 32bit colour. The latter will be sparse though ( read: only 24bit backed by actual memory ), 800x600 in 32bit is a bit more than 2MB.

> I don't mean that it's working in NetBSD now, but that there is
> hope that it will, eventually? I sense great potential for use as X
> Terminals :-)
Definitely yes. But I want basic acceleration first ;)

> (I ran KDE remotely from my main workstation displaying on my SB3GX...
> The collide light on my transceiver was blinking even faster than the
> send/recv lights :-P
Ouch - I remember trying KDE 1.44 under Solaris once... hardly bearable. Right not I'm using amiwm because it's small and uses only 2 additional colour cells :)

> > Besides that it's surprisingly usable even without acceleration. I can't help wondering if Sun's Xserver used
> > any acceleration on this chip at all.
> 
> Even with the CG3 emulation, it wasn't bad, and that was with
> everything further limited by what 10baseT half-duplex could handle.
Well, the only difference is the hardware cursor right now.

> More color depth plus support for external sun mice and it'd be a
> great little X machine.
Later :)

have fun
Michael