VAX 11/730 quickie

I had to re-fit all the cables on mine (a painful job), but at least I had them all, uncut. Are all 3 LEDs on the PSU distribution board (under the transparent cover at the top rear of the PSU) glowing? If not, you have a PSU problem. The oriignal console cable was a straight through ribbon cable with a header socket (to fit the WCS board) at one end and a DB25 plug at the other. It plugs into a filter module on the distibution panel, again straight through with a DB25 plug on the outside. This is wired as a DTE (terminal), you need a null modem cable. Only pins 1,2,3,7 are used, the official cable (I had to make a copy of it) wires 1 and 7 straght through, swaps 2 and 3 and swaps 6 and 20, but you don't need the last pair. Have you set the DIP switch on the WCS board correctly? You can certainly have 300, 1200,2400 or 9600 baud. IIRC some of the other switches do very odd things, so make sure they are set as the manual says. I assume you have checked you are plugged into the console port and not the remote diagnostic port. They're shown on page 208 of the printset on bitsavers. They display the memory controller microcode address (nothing to do with the CPU microcode, the memory controller has its own ROM firmware). I don't think the memory controller is used by the console ROMs, so I doubt if this is the problem. Start by checking the power supply rails (if you haven't already done so), then see if the 8085 console processor is running, and if it tries to access the console serial chip. -tony