Getting Sun Sparcstation 10 to recognize its graphics card

[Rico Pajarola]

Freeze as in "screen stays blank (but pressing caps lock changes the LED)",
or "system does not boot at all", or "system boots but locks up when
initializing graphics"?

I assume it's just the screen staying blank. Note that using an SGI monitor
on a sun using a 13W3 to 13W3 cable will not work. There's 2 ways around
it: you can either use a 13W3 to BNC cable connected to a BNC to 13W3 cable
to connect the monitor, thus disconnecting all non-RGB pins, or you can cut
off the extra (non-RGB) pins on either side of the cable (I've successfully
done that to connect SGI machines to SUN monitors but it should work the
other way around too).


On Tue, Jan 9, 2018 at 9:18 PM, william degnan via cctech <
cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:

> Working from this page to configure my sparcstation 10 after NVRAM
> replacement:
> http://www.obsolyte.com/sunFAQ/faq_nvram.html
>
> ...but curious is there an installation manual or whatever specific to the
> video card in my system, a TurboXGX with STP3010GPA chip
> http://vintagecomputer.net/sun/SparcStation-10/Sun_STP3010PGA_TURBOXGX.jpg
>
> I have Solaris 4 installed.  I am guessing around trying different things.
> With help I have the OS installed but so far I can't get the system to
> recognize the video card and Sun keyboard.  With these installed it freezes
> the system...so, I am using a serial terminal to interact with the system.
> The video display I have is an SGI GDM-20D11
>
> Eventually I'll poke through to the solution, this is my first Sun box, up
> to this point they were "too new" but I'd like to learn how to perform a
> system install.
>
> If I find the answers I am looking for I'll post here.
>
> Bill
>