I've got
the NCD software for mine. I don't want to use them as X
terminals; if I wanted to do that I already would be. I want to run
my own code on them. Not for utility so much as for hack value.
Ahh, most
excellent. What processor is in those? A lot of X
terminals of that era used i960s if I recall.
I don't recall.
*rummage rummage*
MIPS, it would appear.
I have two, apparently identical. Each one is labeled as a 19r; while
this label is on the monitor case, not the smarts, I have never had
more than two and these two are identically labeled, so I feel
reasonably sure they actually are 19rs.
One of them won't power up. When I turn it on the monitor - not the
speaker on the CPU board - makes the tick...tick...tick noise at about
1.5Hz that says to me "power supply constantly failing and retrying".
I haven't yet opened it up to see if I can see what's wrong.
The other one powers up just fine. It won't boot without a network
connection, which I didn't give it, but it does drop into a ROM
monitor. This includes, among other things, a DR command which is
documented as displaying registers. The register dump:
R0 zero R1 at R2 v0 R3 v1 R4 a0 R5 a1 R6 a2 R7 a3
00000000 A0000000 0000007B 000000AB BF800000 00200000 0000000D 00010000
R8 t0 R9 t1 R10 t2 R11 t3 R12 t4 R13 t5 R14 t6 R15 t7
00000020 A0380004 00000000 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 0000B401
R16 s0 R17 s1 R18 s2 R19 s3 R20 s4 R21 s5 R22 s5 R23 s7
00000000 0EC00088 000000D4 0000001B 00000059 00000000 00000000 00000000
R24 t8 R25 t9 R26 k0 R27 k1 R28 gp R29 sp R30 fp R31 ra
AEC1FFFC 0EC00134 00000000 0EC076FC 00000000 0EC1FF30 00000000 0EC0394C
MFLO MFHI BPC BDA DCIC BADA SR CAUSE
00000000 00000008 FFFFFFFF FFFFFFFF 00000000 00000000 0000B401 00000000
DPC PRID
0EC076FC 00000000
Those register names look extremely MIPSy to me.
Also, I opened one of them up and had a look.
Except for the Ethernet board, which is removable, it's got three chips
of significance. (Everything else is random SSI/MSI logic, like
DM74AS32N or a DM74LS04N, or RAM.)
There's a 40-pin DIP labeled SCN2681AC1N40 / 2231M29 / 9314KH. The
other two are square chips of moderately fine pitch of somewhere around
160 pins each (40 per side). One has an NCD logo and is otherwise
labeled USA / (C) 1992 REV B / PN 4400007 / 9322KVA47 and the other is
marked LSI LOGIC (obviously a maker's logo) and is otherwise labeled
LR33000MC-33 / MIPS CTRLR / WB33391 / NNH 9250* / 5C1321WUFBA where
the * represents an approximately equilateral triangle, oriented so it
looks like an over-wide capital delta.
Between the register names and that "MIPS CTRLR", I have little doubt
it's a MIPS CPU core.
It's got RAM soldered to the board - silkscreened next to it is the
text "4 MEGABYTES DRAM" - and four filled 30-pin SIMM sockets. It
reports 8M on powerup; if I remove at least one but not all of the
SIMMs, it tells me which socket(s) is/are empty and reports 4M.
Removing all the SIMMs makes it report 4M without any complaints; I
haven't tried putting non-1M SIMMs into the sockets.
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