The collected works of coredog64

LCD screens are strange beasts - while most will tolerate vertical refresh rates greater than 70Hz, you'd never want to use one at this rate as the image quality degrades.

Now somebody tells me

I picked up a fairly inexpensive Compaq TFT8030 (18" LCD) that
includes SOG as one of it's capabilities. I've been using the analog input driven by my O2 (when it's not plugged into my 1600sw) and have been made physically sick by the display. I'll have to drop the refresh rate and see how that looks -- hopefully it'll make CDE on Tru64 look better too (not that there's much hope for making CDE look better...)

My TFT8030 was $550 and does 1280x1024 and has SOG capability. That, and you get a 3 year warranty from HPaq.

I'm soo jealous. If only the base RM5200 boards weren't so hard to come by. And now that your secret is out, I expect a run on them

RM5200 are hard to find, and even if you find it, its price will be very high.

What do you mean expensive? They're only $995 from SGI

SS20 -- Dual Ross Hypersparcs (forget the spec on them), 9G 10K drive, 256M. Note to others, never put a 10K drive in an SS20. It's too hot.

Ultra 5 -- 360MHz USII, 256M, 40G, USB card

FrankenSPARC -- SPARCEngine motherboard in a cheap aluminum ATX case, 440MHz USII, 1G, 18G, XVR-100 (with DVI console hack).

On the Way:
SB1000 from AnySystem. Thanks unixmuseum!

I've just finished creating an XVR-100 work-alike from a cheaper ATI branded Mac Radeon card. Not only that, but I can display my console output via DVI.

To do this, you'll need an honest to goodness 32MB ATI branded Mac Radeon 7000. I've tried this experiment with a couple of no-name "powered by ATI" cards without success. You'll also need a PeeCee and a Windows boot disk. Anyone who has philosophical objections to that can stop reading now
(FWIW, I created my boot disk via FC4)

Grab a copy of the Radeon firmware flash utility. I got mine via a link here: http://www.appletalk.com.au/articles/in ... rticle=352

Next you'll need a copy of the 1.61 firmware for the XVR-100. If you've already got an XVR-100 with this firmware then you're golden. If not then you should be able to get this firmware from Sun. Pending mod approval I can also post a link to a public webserver that offers this patch.

Back up the Mac BIOS. Hey, you might want to go back. Besides, "measure twice, cut once" is a good rule to live by.

Load the Sun firmware using the flash utility.

Drop your new XVR-100 clone into a Sun box and enjoy DVI console goodness. Hey, it beats the 8 color 800x600 I get from the built in Rage chipset on my U5

Edit: If you don't have the 1.61 firmware the reflash should still work. You'll just be missing out on the DVI console output.

Hey, I gotta scrounge my pennies for a B&W and an XVR-1000

First off, I know Sun didn't initially support DVI console out on these cards. You have to upgrade the initial firmware to version 1.61 (which I mentioned in my other thread about making an XVR-100 out of a Mac Radeon 7k).

I _know_ the XVR-100 supports DVI console out because that's how I have it set up on my SPARCEngine. The problem is that I don't remember how I did it

I took a look @ the output of devalias on the old machine and screen is setup to point to something like this:
/pci@8,700000/SUNW,XVR-100@3 (@1 is the analog video output. I'm guessing @2 is the unsupported S-Video output).

On the SB 1000 I set up a new devalias called "dviconsole" that points to @3. I then set "output-device" to the new devalias.

That gives me output on DVI but only after the X Server starts. The monitor acknowledges it's getting a signal of some sort before then but the screen stays black.

Anyone else have an XVR-100 (Sun or otherwise) and had any success with this? Well, besides forgetful old me

With the exception of the "reset-all" command that's pretty much what I did.

I also tried setting the resolution in the "output-device" NVRAM variable
(i.e. output-device=dviconsole:r1280x1024x60).

So months later I'm using the 'blade and I tried again. Here's what worked for me (you'll probably have to change the device as appropriate:

I need to dig through my links to find it. If it helps, I originally found it via Google. I believe it was Lockheed Martin or somesuch company hosting a collection of useful Sun downloads.

Found it:
It was Google Groups and not generic Google.

Group message:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.uni ... dd36f78242

General Dynamics (hey, I was close) download:
http://chs2.gdc4s.com/sw_supt.htm

Enjoy!

Why do you need a Mac Radeon? Flash size? Similarities with the Sun part?

Yes and yes. The Mac Radeons have larger flash memory and the firmware updater expects the firmware to be that size.

You can dink with it and use "dd" to cut it down to half the size (most of the Sun firmware is zeroed out) I didn't have a lot of success doing so with an off-brand Radeon 7000, even one that typically flashes well to the Mac version.

What happens if you insert a Mac Radeon on a Sun box? Is the OFW Fcode compatible with the Sun OBP?

I never even bothered to try.

Can anyone post here the ROM of a real XVR-100 in a zip file to flash my ATI 7000 PCI 32MB ?

The General Dynamics link posted above has the ROM from a real XVR-100. Not only that, it has the best ROM version:

http://chs2.gdc4s.com/SW_Support/XVR-100(32MB )%20DVI%20Output%20at%20the%20OBP%20Level/xvr100-DVI_console-040512.tar.Z

The download file is a self-extracting shell script. It should (operating from memory here) give you the actual ROM as well as Solaris tools for reading/writing XVR-100 ROMs.

If I get some time later today I can go through the process and call out the exact name of the ROM file.