> Hi, gang,
> 
> 	It just occurred to me... I'm not the only one in the group who owns an
> SQ706A.

Yeah, I have that critter in my MVII crate.  Alas, it is scsi only and won't
do tapes.

> 	I've tried booting from a CD-ROM with the thing on a MicroVAX 3, and it
> didn't fly. 'show dev' wouldn't even show the drive. I also tried putting
> the same CD-ROM drive on my Sigma RQD11S board: No such luck.

Hmmm, maybe it won't handle CD's either.  Dumb board.

> 	It occurred to me that outdated firmware may be to blame in both cases.
> The Sigma board uses an EPROM and a bunch of PALs while the Dilog board
> looks like it uses just an EPROM. If other SQ706A and/or Sigma owners would
> like to share a dump of their board's EPROM, I would certainly be happy to
> archive it (them?) and make such available to others.

I could check and see what the prom says it is.  Is there a way to get
to it short of hooking the console up to the 706 port?

> 	Shall we compare versions? ;-)

Sure....

Following the thread with the Earliest VAX port, I was playing around
last night with Tahoe, Reno, and Quasijarus.  None of them would boot
with their native boot blocks.... bad karma.  But, I was able to get
the NetBSD-1.0A VAX boot blocks to load the Reno and Quasijarus
kernels.  The problem was that everything went fine up through the
mem/ethernet/etc, checks, but, the thing shelled out with the ol'
all hands abandon ship panic to reboot syndrome.  I am beginning
to suspect that the board can't handle the mscp-to-scsi conversion
correctly, or there seems to be something veddy funky going on with
the mscp emulation.  That means that I won't be able to get a running
Quasijarus/Reno/Tahoe setup unless I backpedal to a dumb mfm controller.
Anyone know, for sure, if the Dilogic 696? ESDI controller correctly
emulates mscp close enough to boot/run the old 4.3BSD stuff?
Else, anyone got a spare dumb, dumb, dumb ol' mfm controller with
cables and patchpanel bits for an MVII?  Drat... I was really hoping
I could get a 4.3BSD up easily on the scsi disks.... oh, well....

On another thread, of all the different ports I have had running on
the ol' MVII critter lately (1.0A, 1.2, 1.3.2, 1.4.1, 1.4.2, 1.4.3,
and 1.5), all hands note that the 1.4.3 is by far the best in my
machine, runs the fastest, ethernets the fastest, and is not too
bad at loading (about 2 minutes to boot/load vs 6 minutes on 1.5!,
vs 1 minute on 1.0A!).  That really does kindof suggest that on
MVII crates, the 1.4.3 may be the end of the line, practically
speaking.  1.5 just crawls.  The 1.4.3 still has a broken shutdown
that locks up after running the hooks and fails to actually sync and
halt.  I have to manually sync;sync;halt to get it to really shutdown.
Other than that, the 1.4.3 suite seems pretty nice, and it runs well
on the SQ706A controller.

Thanks

Bob