The collected works of commodorejohn - Page 1

I recently bought a VAXStation on eBay, and it arrived today; it's in good shape, powers on and appears to get through the self-test. However, I'm having some problems, and I'm wondering if anybody can help me with them:

• I don't seem to be getting a picture out of the video card (PV21X-GD high-resolution color board.) I'm using an LCD monitor (Samsung Syncmaster 193p Plus) that is supposed to support sync-on-green (and that definitely supports the resolution and refresh rate used) with a makeshift cable setup (RS/6000 3W3-to-BNC cable plus 3xBNC-to-VGA cable - I gather that the RS/6000 has red and blue switched around, but I accounted for that and anyway it should only affect the colors, not the ability to form a picture.) But I'm not getting anything - the monitor OSD is claiming "no signal," not even that it's out-of-range. Is there some trick to this that I'm missing?
• More problematically, I can't get to the console over the serial port, either. I have the baud rate set correctly on my terminal, but I'm not seeing any output at all. Do the console functions only work over the MMJ RS-423 serial port and not the DB-25 RS-232 one?

Yeah, I got out the multimeter and verified continuity on the cabling; everything is going where it should, so the problem's either at the monitor end or the VAX end. Wish I had an oscilliscope...


I reseated it myself, it's in there as firmly as I could get it without undue strain...


Thanks for clearing that up. Is converting RS-423 (as I read the MMJ uses this) to RS-232 simply a matter of wiring?


I've had it in both positions, corresponding to my attempts to use the serial port or monitor as the console...

Yep, I already got the service manuals off Manx. I'll see about getting an MMJ cable made...

Well, a guy on the Vintage Computer Forums made me an adapter, so as soon as that gets here I'll at least be able to get it up and running. Graphics will have to wait until I can get a known-compatible monitor, but luckily there are a few the folks on comp.os.vms recommended that can be had quite cheaply.

Okay, my serial adapter got here this morning, and she's booting to the console over the serial port It's actually got the full 104MB of RAM; this was more of a score than I'd realized! Still having some trouble, though. For starters, SHOW DEVICE doesn't seem to list the hard drive, so I'm assuming some SCSI voodoo is in order. Joy. :/ (That, or my 68-to-50-pin adapter doesn't work - entirely possible, as I've never actually used it before. I need to get my PC SCSI controller installed so I can verify some of this stuff...)

Furthermore, while it recognizes the CD drive just fine, when I try to boot from it ( b/r5:10000000 dka400: , according to the OpenVMS VAX install guide ,) it loads from disk and then just sits there. It might simply be taking a while, but there's no further disk activity, and the two times I've halted it in the middle, it's shown the exact same PC value, which kinda suggests that it's just sitting idle at that address...is there something I'm missing, here?

Internal. It's a newer drive (Ultra2 LVD SCSI,) and I'm getting conflicting reports from the folks on comp.os.vms on how friendly later VAXStations are with newer SCSI equipment. However, I did verify that A. the drive works (in my PC, on the controller's 68-pin connector,) and B. the 68-to-50-pin adapter doesn't (on the controller's 50-pin connector.) This is not a terrible surprise, as I grabbed the cheapest Chinese bare-board adapter off eBay (I've since learned my lesson about doing that,) and then never used it for anything, so I had no idea if it worked to begin with.

Now I just need to get a halfway decent one...

The CD-ROM drive is a DEC RRD-42 - it's compatible with the VAX, but according to the folks on comp.os.vms it can't handle CD-R media, which would be the source of the problem for me. I have a Plextor drive on the way that supports 512-byte sectors and that some promo material claims is Alpha/VAX-compatible.

Well, I'd rather just get another CD drive working with it if possible, but I'll keep that in mind. Netbooting's always been a PITA in my experience, though, and I can't imagine it's easier on older equipment.

Well, a couple of decent (read: overpriced!) 68-to-50-pin converters (with high-byte termination) and an IBM/Plextor CD-ROM drive from my RS/6000 solved my SCSI woes, and a huge old NEC LCD monitor allowed me to get video working, so that's that out of the way. Now I just need to navigate my way through the OpenVMS install process...

Well, I've got some miscellaneous extra install files on another CD, and I figured out how to mount the CD from the DCL prompt, but I'm having a bit of trouble figuring out where it's mounted to. I'm working my way through the OpenVMS User's Manual, but in the meantime, is there a quick/simple guide to how the VMS filesystem hierarchy works?

Can anyone tell me what parameters I should use for SET TERMINAL to match whatever the VAXStation 4000 graphical console emulates? I can't find much in the way of manuals for the graphical option boards, so I don't know if they specify or not. I would bet that I can just tell it to be a VT-100 and have no problems, but it'd be nice to know exactly what it's supposed to be.

Yeah, the guys on comp.os.vms informed me that the graphical (i.e. non-serial) console is basically a glass TTY. I didn't have DECWindows installed at the time because I was having a little trouble with the installation kits, but I got that resolved (unzipping them on the PC and burning a CD with the unzipped files missed some metadata that was apparently important,) so DECWindows is now up and running and the question is irrelevant.

On to trying out DOOM

I've used old Apple SCSI CD-ROM drives with CD-Rs before and never had an issue, myself...not on the VAX, tho.

Huzzah for creeping assimilation into homogeneity.

I'm 27, and I'm a little surprised by how many people are in my age bracket here.

No, I got mine from an eBay seller who posts them periodically for quite cheap. (Ah, here. )

I need to play around with RiscOS on my Pi some more. The more Windows goes down the tablet toilet, the more I really want to find an alternative, but I've been burned with Linux too many times to consider that route. What I've seen of RiscOS impresses me greatly. It'd take some getting used to to not have Photoshop or Jeskola Buzz, but any full-featured image-editing program should theoretically work for drawing (at least if the rPi version supports Wacom tablets,) and now that I'm branching out into MIDI gear I'm not as dependent on x86 VSTs for music as I was even at the beginning of the year...

I listen to a lot of music (there are a few genres I can't stand and won't touch, but not many,) but I'm particularly big into '60s-'70s classic rock (and '60s pop-rock, before "pop" split off to become its own boring, written-by-committee thing.) Everything from the Monkees to Chicago (the good , '60s-'70s Chicago, that is) to Deep Purple is pretty much my cup of tea. I'm also a fan of golden-age video game music (everything from the Ms. Pac-Man interstitials through the Super Nintendo and Yamaha FM synthesis on the Genesis and PC.) Modern J-pop/rock also gets something of a thumbs-up; I only really like a certain percentage of it, but I admire the rabidity and enthusiasm with which Japanese songwriters cannibalize and syncretize such a massive variety of source material. Lately I've even been getting into some late-'80s/early-'90s New Age stuff (found a stash of Narada Records tapes at the thrift store for dirt-cheap and needed something to listen to when driving,) though I find it to be more background music than listening music.

My truest love, however, is classic progressive rock of the '60s and '70s. Yes, Pink Floyd, Genesis (again, the good , early-to-mid-'70s Genesis,) King Crimson, ELP, and so many other lesser-known groups (Starcastle - the best Yes cover band that never actually covered Yes!) Part of it's that, as with J-pop, I greatly admire people with a broad musical palate who freely incorporate any influence they want into their own unique watchagot stew of sounds, and prog is that in spades, with the added bonus that nobody feels that it's some sort of mortal sin to have any song that's longer than seven minutes and it's better to stay closer to four, so they get plenty of room to play with longer, more complex ideas and instrumental virtuosity. (Granted, some of them can take it too far the other way, but still.) There's also the fact that I just love the sounds of the Mellotron, Hammond B-3, and Minimoog, and they're genre standards in prog. This is the genre that my own efforts most often fall into, up to and including the 17-minute space-rock epic I finished last spring. (Currently working on the last piece of an album built around that...)

Mmm. Good stuff, that prog-rock.

Gnash works for stuff like HomestarRunner and Newgrounds cartoons, but it doesn't handle Flash video players well, in my experience. I struggled for days to get Lightspark to run on Debian on a G5, and that could play YouTube, except it was crashy as hell.

Well, that gives us a good few years to crack the license format and steal the source code...

Bastards. Like we need to be moving closer to a world of indistinguishable Unix derivatives.

It's not that there haven't been noticeable impacts, it's that they haven't been ones that are really all that great. It's cool that we've got forums like this, and we can send email across the world many times faster than it takes to mail a letter, but overall were we really that much worse off in, say, the '70s or '80s for not having "modern" software? Seems to me we got along just fine back then.


That's what really burns about this - HP having been trying to bury OpenVMS since they acquired it, this is just them finally getting it positioned properly in the grave. It's all politics...there ought to be a law that a company that buys out a product line is obligated to support it indefinitely, then maybe we wouldn't get so many companies that acquire something for the purpose of squashing and/or "buying" its customer base.

Again, though, I'm not saying there haven't been some spiffy things done, I'm saying that the Dark Ages didn't extend through the 1990s. The fact that a kid who's grown up with PCs being commonplace fixtures of daily life might see it that way doesn't make it so.

Hey, those worked just fine...heck, VMS Notes is still available on a lot of systems

First off, the fact that most people don't subscribe to a viewpoint has no relevance to its accuracy. I'm not saying that people don't think they're a million times better off now than they were in the dark ages of the '70s and '80s, I'm saying that they really weren't - no matter what they think.

Additionally, it's not as inescapable as all that yet. For the time being, we still have the choice of whether or not to be involved in a lot of things; I don't have a Facebook account, and I never will. I do have a cell phone, but only in case of getting stranded on the road in the snow or somesuch, and I don't hesitate to turn the damn thing off when I want some quiet time.

And anyway, even if it is inevitable, who says we have to approve of it?


Right here. That whole page is worth reading; the man is so far removed into the realm of sensible and sane from the IT industry at large that it's not even funny...

Indeed, Stroustrup's comments are a breath of fresh air; what I mean is that it's sad that the rest of the industry is so lost in the wilderness compared to this one prof...

Go. See. This. Movie. If you have even a sliver of geek or B-movie fan in you or even just want to see spectacle blockbusters that take joy in their premise again instead of being constantly grimy and dour, do not miss this movie. It's a note-perfect homage/tribute/mashup/fan film for mecha anime and Japanese monster movies alike, mixed in with Hollywood summer blockbuster sensibilities - but from those halcyon days when summer blockbusters could actually be good and fun. It wears Neon Genesis Evangelion on its sleeve in many ways, but unlike that show it keeps the "giant robots versus Godzilla" aspect front and center and develops its characters through that, instead of devolving into navel-gazing.

My God you guys, do not miss this movie.

It's definitely a serious movie and not a spoof (though it's packed with little funny bits that lighten the mood but don't get in the way,) but it's not dour and joyless like so many modern blockbusters...