Day 2

So I had actually not finished cleaning the keyboard on Day 1, but went ahead and put all those photos together, since it fits more appropriately. I have not yet retr0brite'd the keyboard due to it being too cloudy to bother. Also, inside the keyboard assembly the metal backing piece is starting to rust, so it should probably be hit with some CLR (calcium lime rust) or something and scrubbed; didn't do it now though.

I found a Sun 4 mouse with the same form factor as the Sun 3 one, and that one has both the felt pads, so I might case-swap the two since I don't have any spare sticky felt pads just laying about.

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Okay, now for the real progress report. After crossing my fingers and wiring up the DE9 and DE15 plugs connecting HSync, VSync, Sync GND, and using the V+ and V- line from the bwtwo into the green color V+ and V- using a schottky on V+, I was able to get video output on a VGA CRT. Surprisingly, the one I selected first, a 17" AOC 7vlr, whose specs should support that signal doesn't seem to have a good picture, though it does sync up. The second CRT I tried, a Compaq 151FS looks much better, and I found out you can kinda obtain a "reverse video" if you stick the schottky diode in the opposite polarity, though the readability is poor at best in that configuration. The LCD panel I tried next didn't complain about HSYNC out of range or anything, but just mostly turned whiteish and you can't see the picture on it. Perhaps it's 'cause I'm floating all the red and blue pins or something. So I guess I will be trying to get proper white before I solder up the adapter. Since each of the R, G, and B lines are supposed to be 75 Ohm, connecting them together to the bwtwo's "video" lines would probably be too little resistance, since in parallel the current will spread across all paths. So probably will have to add like 50 Ohm resisters to each of the lines or something to get a proper 75 Ohm when combined. Will come back to this before building the final connector.

The other images in this set is just playing around with the memory fill command in the ROM monitor: since the bwtwo is at 0x100000, you can use the fill command to draw rudimentary patterns on screen by computing the offset where you want the pattern to begin and end at. Yay!

I'm guessing that green vertical line is happening during the HSync, perhaps it's not blanking all the way or something. If you adjust the horizontal position using the buttons on front of the CRT, you will see it move left/right but... I have no idea if it can be removed or not yet.

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Next up: ethernet. I dragged out some 10Base2, T-connectors, terminators, and a 10BaseT + 10Base2 hub when I was doing the dungeon crawl through the storage boxes. More details after I have them attached and set up a boot server.