16 Sep
2020
16 Sep
'20
9:05 a.m.
On Sep 15, 2020, at 4:55 PM, Gregg Levine <gregg.drwho8(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Chris I have one of the later ones, a 133 in fact, and
I've been
trying to find what I could run on it. Never mind a case for it, plus
power supply and stuff.... Can you share, off list of course, where
you'd gotten it?
Oh, I don’t mind sharing on-list! I just bought the board—and a system controller, and
some additional RAM boards, as well as the VME chassis with built-in PSU—on eBay. Lots of
sellers are willing to make pretty good deals. There’s barely anything I paid over US$100
for, and I’ve only been collecting the VME stuff for a couple years.
In theory you should be able to use any VME or VXI chassis for most VME hardware. What’s
hard to find are manuals for anything not on Bitsavers[1], or software to run on it. At
least NetBSD has been ported to the common 68030+ and PowerPC VME boards, and an old
version of OpenBSD runs on the common 88K ones. Alas the 133 doesn’t have an MMU so it’s
going to be a bit more restricted.
One of the reasons to run MINIX 1.5 on my MVME121 is that it should be nice and fast on a
10MHz system with 8.5MB of RAM (including 4KB of cache), and as a V7 UNIX clone with an
ANSI C compiler it’ll be easy to write for and port to. It’ll probably also be nicer than
running one of the first few versions of Motorola System V/68 on it too, since I think
that’s SVR1…
Your 133 should also be straightforward to port MINIX to as well, since all the hardware’s
simple, standard, and documented in the manual (plus data books).
My plan was to start with MINIX 1.5 on Atari ST under Hatari, then just write some device
drivers and a boot loader to replace the ST-specific ones.
— Chris
[1] Or Artisan Technology Group’s web site; they sell a ton of used VME hardware, and seem
to collect what manuals and data sheets they can and provide them as PDF.