HP/DEC/Compaq

Perhaps, but OpenVMS is ‘officially’ not supported on the 164LX and 164SX systems . Digital/Tru64 UNIX will whine less, or perhaps not at all. In fact, Tru64 UNIX and even up to the last versions (e.g. V5.1B-4, -5 and -6, if you can get a hold of it) also runs better on, say, a Multia/UDB (or an equivalent AXPpci-type system, which the Multia/UDB resembles quite a bit).

Good to know. Thanks!

My PC164 runs OpenVMS and Tru64 flawlessly, even X11. The operating systems check the PCI vendor IDs to see if they're compatible.

SCSI drives? How did you install it?

Now maybe you can install Tru64 and help me make pkgsrc builds
My box isn't really snappy.

PC164 =/= 164LX (completely). PC164 is a supported OpenVMS machine, 164LX may or may not work - I don't have one to check.

My PC164 works just fine with a ISP1040 SCSI card, Trio64 graphics (currently Permidia2 graphics), SCSI CD/HDDm PS/2 graphics and a DEC TULIP Fast Ethernet card (DE500). Note that generic TULIPs may or may not work, and some Intels may or may not work. Genuine DEC is needed for it to be available at SRM it seems.

Plug and play.

For OVMS you need a DEC-ROMMED Symbios Ultra-wide card (53C7-can't-remember-right-now) if you want to go that route. Generic 53C710 works, but the UW Symbios driver has a check-for-DEC routine in it. The QLogic driver doesn't, and if I recall neither does the Tru64 driver.

The only OS that can boot from the IDE controller is *BSD or Linux. Mine either has a Qlogic ISP1020 or 1040 controller. Video is from an Elsa Gloria Synergy card. It boots fine from an old 12x Toshiba (XM-5701B). For ethernet you'll a DEC Tulip based NIC. Installation is pretty straightforward once you boot from the media. If you want I could get more details. The trick is finding the right cards on ebay where the seller is not advertising them as specific for Alpha or DEC. People were selling that ancient 32mb video card for $150 while its really only worth $10.

I owned a Tekram SCSI controller with the correct chipset but wrong PCI ID. Nothing would boot from it. So I had the bright idea of trying to hex edit the firmware binary to the matching ID. My understanding of binary was less than stellar and ended up bricking the card. Who knew the values had to be entered backwards?

Aside from the Adaptec SCSI controller (which works fine anyway,) I've got a Diamond DM975 video card, a 3Com 3C905C-TXM 10/100 NIC, and a Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold. All of it's on the HCL I got from the Alpha 2k CD, so it should hopefully be no problem once I get 2000 installed, but NT 4.0...I dunno. I've got NT 4.0 drivers, but the installers error out, and installing the .inf files manually does jack. I presume that the "NT" driver packs for these simply didn't come with AXP drivers...

The Sound Blaster should work with NT built-in AWE32 or SB16 drivers (this is how mine works).

Hmm, I'll give that a shot.

Well, I nabbed a full 512MB of ECC PC100 from my local recycle center (along with some other goodies - a Sun Ultra 1 and a bunch of ECC EDO DRAM for that RS/6000, though I've yet to test either,) and 2000 is now up and running It recognized most everything off the bat, but still no luck with the video card, even though it's in the HCL on the CD...guess I'll have to dig up a replacement if I want more than 800x600x16...

Sounds like you maximized it nicely.

Did you fix the board into a chassis in the meantime? Speaking of which, I was also wondering about these boards — with all the modern liquid cooling setups, especially the fairly safe internal circuit ones — if one could ‘overclock’ such a board with a certain custom cooling setup. (Although that might be a bit of a pricey experiment...)

Did you also give Tru64 UNIX a try on it? There's a good deal of software for it like OpenOffice (which, last time I checked, isn't even available for some ‘live’ UNIX operating systems like HP-UX, for what it's worth). I have a bunch of PCI cards (like a NIC, soundcard, etc.) which should be fully Tru64 UNIX compatible and even got them to work inside an officially unsupported (or barely supported) system like the Multia/UDB.

Yes, the board is now sitting in a ridiculous "automotive"-themed gaming tower (it has blue-LED headlights and a grille covering the front USB ports! Fortunately you can turn them off.) It was a cheap ATX case/PSU combo at the recycle center, what can I say...

I haven't tried Tru64 on account of it needing a different firmware than NT uses (VMS needs it, too, unfortunately.) It should theoretically be easy to reflash it, as the NT BIOS includes a firmware-update facility right in the setup menu, but I don't really want it that badly...if I get bored of 2000, I may give it a shot, but we'll see.