I just got this a couple days ago. Its useless without the sbus card I didn't get and they sort of sucked to begin with. I had a complete setup in the 90's and it was pretty pointless but, they were pretty rare. At the time Sun people told me it was the last direct attempt by Sun to compete with SGI in the graphics arena. After it failed to make any market inroads Sun gave up forever.
All the chips are kind of pretty to look at anyway. I am sure the gold guys would love to dunk this in acid but, they can't have it. Case is probably going to a 4/110 with a really ugly partial case.
Here's a little usenet post about it:
The host interface was an sbus card with a big wide connector on the back
(looks like a wide SCSI connector, but wider). An interconnect cable
(carrying 32-bit(?) differential parallel data) went from the sbus card to
the GT chassis. It was designed to work with the SS2 and SS10, there's
support to use it as a console, but I do remember it working with other
systems - there was code in the GT startup script (microcode load) to
error out on Galaxy (4/600) systems at one point in time. I'm not sure if
they fixed that in the end.
There were driver files only for sun4c and sun4m, and only up to Solaris
2.4. It will output 76Hz 1280x1024 video, and if you power it up without
any host connected, you should get a sequence of test patterns. You
need the sbus card and cable to get it to do anything meaningful.
It was s-l-o-w for blitting 2D data, though a couple fast clear planes
helped with fills. XGL was the recommend 3D API, and transforms were
taken care of by an onboard i860XR. It did T&L acceleration, not
texturing. From the man page:
NAME
gt - double buffered 24-bit SBus color frame buffer and graphics
accelerator
DESCRIPTION
gt is a 24-bit SBus-based color frame buffer and graphics accelerator.
The frame buffer consists of 108 video memory planes of 1280 .1024 pixels
including 24-bit double buffering, 16 alpha/overlay planes, 24 z-buffer
planes, 10 window ID planes, 8 fast clear planes, and 2 cursor planes. It
provides the standard frame buffer interface defined in fbio(7), paired
with microcode that can be downloaded using gtconfig(1M). Application
acceleration is achieved via the XGL native 3D graphics library.
I think that TGS(?) had OpenGL almost kind of running on it. Ford used a
number of these things for CAD/CAM and had no end of trouble with them -
they finally scrapped them when the ZX and TZX came out (which were much
less buggy). It's an interesting bit of history (and cost something over
$50k brand new) but it was never a great piece of hardware.
All the chips are kind of pretty to look at anyway. I am sure the gold guys would love to dunk this in acid but, they can't have it. Case is probably going to a 4/110 with a really ugly partial case.
Here's a little usenet post about it:
The host interface was an sbus card with a big wide connector on the back
(looks like a wide SCSI connector, but wider). An interconnect cable
(carrying 32-bit(?) differential parallel data) went from the sbus card to
the GT chassis. It was designed to work with the SS2 and SS10, there's
support to use it as a console, but I do remember it working with other
systems - there was code in the GT startup script (microcode load) to
error out on Galaxy (4/600) systems at one point in time. I'm not sure if
they fixed that in the end.
There were driver files only for sun4c and sun4m, and only up to Solaris
2.4. It will output 76Hz 1280x1024 video, and if you power it up without
any host connected, you should get a sequence of test patterns. You
need the sbus card and cable to get it to do anything meaningful.
It was s-l-o-w for blitting 2D data, though a couple fast clear planes
helped with fills. XGL was the recommend 3D API, and transforms were
taken care of by an onboard i860XR. It did T&L acceleration, not
texturing. From the man page:
NAME
gt - double buffered 24-bit SBus color frame buffer and graphics
accelerator
DESCRIPTION
gt is a 24-bit SBus-based color frame buffer and graphics accelerator.
The frame buffer consists of 108 video memory planes of 1280 .1024 pixels
including 24-bit double buffering, 16 alpha/overlay planes, 24 z-buffer
planes, 10 window ID planes, 8 fast clear planes, and 2 cursor planes. It
provides the standard frame buffer interface defined in fbio(7), paired
with microcode that can be downloaded using gtconfig(1M). Application
acceleration is achieved via the XGL native 3D graphics library.
I think that TGS(?) had OpenGL almost kind of running on it. Ford used a
number of these things for CAD/CAM and had no end of trouble with them -
they finally scrapped them when the ZX and TZX came out (which were much
less buggy). It's an interesting bit of history (and cost something over
$50k brand new) but it was never a great piece of hardware.
(single-CM)
-
.
