[HECnet] VS4000/90: Up and running!

[Jordi Guillaumes i Pons]

I got the replacement RTC chips this week and I have replaced the old one. After a little scare, now the 4000/90 is up and running, and keeping time and date.

Why the scare? Well. I ordered two chips. One of the ones I have got is faulty. Of course, the faulty one is the one I plugged in first... :)

Now I'm not sure about the state of the (by now) working chip. Buying to chinese traders via ebay has its risks :). On the other hand, I have improvised a testbench for the chips using an arduino, and I see the "damaged" ones _can_ keep the time-of-day, even if them are reporting as "faulty" (VRT bit in register D reads as zero).

I remember someone in the list was waiting for replacement for a DS1287A too. So just beware... I guess I have been lucky, 50% of my RTCs work :)

(If anyone wants the arduino sketch I'm using to test the chips, just say so).

Oh, now I need a disk for that machine. Right now it is running diskless as a satellite of my 4000/60, paging via ethernet (ouch!). I have some SCA-68-50 pin adapters for SCSI disks, and I have used those with success with 4GB drives, but I have read somewhere the vaxstation firmware can't handle disks bigger than that. Anyone knows if that is true? Can I plug in a generic, big SCSI disk and hope it will work?


Jordi Guillaumes Pons
jguillaumes at me.com
HECnet: BITXOV::JGUILLAUMES