On 8/23/10, John Ball <ball.of.john at gmail.com> wrote: Those machines are identical underneath - the only difference is the installed framebuffer (or not) and a jumper (in one position for a MicroVAX 2000, the other position for a VAXstation 2000), in case you didn't already know. Good. In case your ST-251 dies, it's just an ST-251, and the boot ROMs can format a blank one. That can be solved, I'm sure. I know a common solution back in the day was a 6-wire cable with an MMJ on one end and either an RJ45 or RJ11 on the other end, depending on which modular connector standard you were using at your site (we had Nevada Western 6-pin gear at our place). The other solution was to not use the adapter box and plug a DE9 console cable (same as a MicroVAX II, IIRC) into J3. You won't have easy access to the other two serial ports (though you could make a level shifter yourself), but it should be easy enough to make a console cable with stuff many of us on the list have lying around the house (don't know how well fixed you are for making random cables) As Ian pointed out, J5. You'll need a specific cable to go with your framebuffer and monitor. There are a couple of options - mono vs RGB, IIRC. That's because the "break out box" as you are calling it, is a MicroVAX 2000-specific option to do voltage shifting of the mouse and keyboard serial channels as well as integrate the console connector into an "easy to access" format. The three ways I know to connect to a uV/VS2K are: 1. set the jumper for VAXstation, and plug a BC18 or BC19 monitor cable on J5 and plug in a DEC mouse, DEC keyboard and compatible tube. 2. set the jumper for MicroVAX and plug a DEC console cable (BCC08) into J3 and use some flavor of dumb terminal or terminal emulator for a console. 3. set the jumper for MicroVAX and plug an MMJ into the console port on the adapter box and proceed like #2 above. You want something like a VR260 or VR290. The VR201 is RS-170 ("NTSC") mono video, which is almost certainly too low a bandwidth to handle the output of a workstation. The VR201 will work great with a Rainbow or a VT240 base or a DECmate, but not a VAXstation. There might well be plenty of workstation tubes out there that work just as well as a DEC one, but unless they have BNC inputs for color and sync, you might have to roll your own cable. In addition to Ian's link, you might find this document to be helpful: http://decdoc.itsx.net/pdp11nl/v2000sg1.pdf -ethan