HP 9817 Usage

[Tony Duell]

On Tue, May 26, 2020 at 4:31 PM TangentDelta via cctalk
<cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>
> Hello!
>
> I have an HP 9817 and its accompanying 9133D disk drive unit.
>
> The disk drive seems like a rather large can of worms, so I've been ignoring it. I re-capped the 9817's power supply. It powers up and it passes all of its diagnostics according to the LEDs on the motherboard. I can see that it is outputting a picture on the composite video connector, but I don't have any displays that will accept the weird sync frequency that it uses. I also do not have an HIL keyboard to use with the machine.

Which video card do you have? Given you mention 'composite video' I'm
assuming an HP98204. But the 98204A and 98204B are quite different.
The -A outputs TV rate video (and can drive many common monitors), the
-B has a faster horizontal scan rate (so more lines in the raster,
higher resolution) and drives a special HP monitor, HP35731 (this is
actually a Samsung chassis and it shows, it is nowhere near the build
quality I'd expect from HP at that time).

> Should I look at buying a monitor that can support the composite video sync and get an HIL keyboard (or build an adapter)? Does the machine not support using a terminal over the serial port as a console at boot?

I don't think it'll support a serial console. I've never got an
HP9000/200 series machine to do so.