24 Feb
2008
24 Feb
'08
3:09 p.m.
Tony Duell wrote:
YEs, AFAIK there were never published schematics for
the VAXstations.
And
since (from the few I've looked inside) they're full of custom
silicon,
it's going to be very hard to produce meaningful schematics of such
machines.
Maybe, but I think that bitsavers has schematics for at least one of the
MicroVAX 3100 series machines. These are of the same vintage as at least
some of the machines in question.
For a machine built drom known components (ICs you can
get data
sheets or
at least pinouts for, etc), it's possible (although a lot of work
[1]) to
trace out the schematics. But II don't fancy doing it for a machine
where
the pinouts of the CPU and the main support ICs are unknown.
For the Alpha-based machines, there's plenty of information. I think
that
the EV4 and EV5 pinouts are floating around. I would be surprised if the
EV6 stuff were not too. Some of the VAX CPUs and support chips did
appear
in various Semiconductor Volumes, some of which are also floating
around.
It would still be difficult to fix a fault in such a chip (even if a
replacement
could be found) since they at some stage went to BGA and even access to
the
appropriate tools + experience doen't get you a success rate much above
50%.
That being said, I didn?t see sufficient information or detail in the
posts
so far to suggest that _anything_ is actually broken as opposed to being
misconfigured or misused.
I think the OP would do well to state exactly what is believed to be
working
and then pick on one of his apparently broken machines. It may be that
some
simple reconfiguring is all that is required. Or maybe the machine can
be
stripped to the bare minimum to see if it comes up then (I think I've
mentioned
before the mouse on my VS3100-76 that stopped it powering up at all
...).
Antonio
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