how hard is it to track down a replacement NeXT cube motherboard? Bill On Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 11:38 AM John Robertson via cctalk < cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

I have a cube project coming up eventually myself Bill On Tue, Jul 16, 2024, 1:23 PM Joshua Rice via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote:

I have one in my closet Sent from my iPhone

On Wed, Jul 17, 2024 at 01:33:56AM -0500, CAREY SCHUG via cctalk wrote: Yes, and they often publish them for others to use for free on e.g. their GitHub repository or Thingiverse. Here's a random one on Thingiverse for an Octane: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2512810 There are things like SCSI2SD, BlueSCSI, CF2SCSI and so on. Some of these are also Open Source so you can send the gerbers off to JLCPCB and build it yourself if they're out of stock or sold from a country which thinks that $100 is a perfectly reasonable shipping charge for something which fits in an envelope[0]. However, the SCSI emulators tend to be bare boards and are not a drop-in replacement for 3.5" disks because the mounting holes don't line up with the caddies. But of course you can go back to Thingiverse and find designs for suitable adaptors. Let's suppose that you want to put a SCSI2SD in an Octane. You'd quickly discover that the SCSI2SD speaks 50-pin narrow SCSI over a boxed pin header whereas the Octane expects 80-pin SCA. It would generally be about this point that I'd realise this wasn't a simple job, go "bugger this" and look to see if there was an internal or external SCSI where the adaptor is more likely to fit. But if we were to persist, we'd also need to design a custom SCA adaptor board. There are off-the-shelf SCA adaptor boards, but the SCA port is the wrong gender as they are intended for plugging an SCA disk into a machine with "normal" SCSI rather than plugging a SCSI device into a SCA backplane. At least these are nice chunky through-hole parts amenable to hand-soldering, so back to JLCPCB for the board and AliExpress for a scavenged connector if you don't already have a dead hard disk to cannibalise for parts. And then you'd need to 3D-print another adaptor which mounts your SCA board in the right place to mate with the Octane's backplane. This is certainly a reasonable amount of work and there'll probably be some respins due to design mistakes or parts being out of tolerance. Me, I'd probably just cable-tie and/or hot-snot the SCSI2SD into an external enclosure and plug it into the HD68 on the back of the Octane, leaving the 3D printer unloved. SCSI enclosures aren't too hard to acquire: I even found one in a charity shop here in Zaandam[2]. (It made a refreshing change from the usual chipped mugs and bottom-of-the-pops CDs.) Some of those free 3D models can leave a lot to be desired. My flatmate asked for a door wedge so I hit up Thingiverse. I found a model which was amusingly-shaped as a cheese wedge, and since I had orange filament already loaded, gave it a spin. The common STL file format has unitless dimensions, but it is widely accepted in the 3D printer community to be millimetres. Unfortunately, Americans also do designs. I immediately saw the problem with the wedge and enlarged it somewhat, but also printed one at the original size for a laugh. It was about 2mm high. 2 inches is probably a bit big but not unreasonably so for a door wedge, which suggests what happened here. Even at a saner size it still didn't really grip the floor properly. I happened to spot an Atari ST in a pile of flytipped rubbish on my travels[1] and brought that back to refurbish, joking that it was also about the right wedge shape. Eventually I just picked up a proper door wedge in Lidl. Apparently one can just walk into a shop and buy a ready-made thing which just works instead of engaging upon a project to build something a bit temperamental, which possibly comes as a surprise to many of us. [0] When searching for stuff, I filter out USA-based vendors for this reason. Sorry if you're a vendor who ships at cost via USPS surface mail and knows how to fill in a customs form correctly, but you're an outlier. [1] My bike broke and I've not yet gotten round to repairing it, so I've been going around at a leisurely 7km/h. This has been a revelation as I get to see all sorts of things in the local area which I had not noticed before when tearing along the roads rather than taking shortcuts through side streets and back alleys. [2] It's basically a dormitory town of Amsterdam. There are some windmills to fleece tourists with, and it smells nice when Verkade is doing a run of chocolate biscuits, but is otherwise one of those places that people end up in "just until I get things sorted and find somewhere better" and still find themselves there many years later.

it was kind of a general question, but I have a sparcstation 5 or two that it would be nice to put a second disk into. Also SGI indigo and Indy that I think needed caddies...it's been so long. I bought them but never followed up, not having had any experience in my working life. I had a stack of sparcstation 5s with no disk, hence needing caddies, but I donated them to a local VCF. They were received with the hope of my running a solaris install class at a local nonprofit when we didn't know that had no disks. <pre>--Carey</pre>

On Tue, Jul 16, 2024 at 1:04 PM cz via cctalk &lt;cctalk(a)classiccmp.org&gt; wrote: Yes it is, and as I found out when I pulled out my NeXT cube for VCF 5 years ago, the default boot device you get after replacing the battery is the optical drive (which mine does not have - I have the fat Maxtor drive). From that thread, this is a handy link for new NeXT owners (still good in 2024)... http://n-1.nl/next/hardware/info/rom-monitor.html And in my case, this is what I had to do... "Turns out, the default when populating from dead/missing battery is 'od'. Fixed it by jumping into the ROM prompt and using 'p' to set the default to 'sd' then 'b sd' to fire it up." -ethan ~