[rescue] newest rescue

[Nathan Raymond]

On Wed, Feb 3, 2016 at 1:12 PM, John Hudak <jjhudak at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi, and thanks for the critique...yea, 'toys' may have been a bit harsh and
> a little inaccurate....'castrated' may have been better.   So....
> "The SE/30 was also a great machine because it was a 68030 (so integrated
> PMMU) with a 68882 FPU and a 32-bit PDS slot that could take a variety of
> expansion cards and accelerators as well (color video cards, networking
> cards, CPU accelerators, etc.)  It could also take a maximum of 128MB of
> RAM. And if you can track down an early era IIsi, it's 32-bit clean ROM is
> on a card and can be swapped into an SE/30 to make it 32-bit clean. In my
> experience both the IIci and SE/30 ran NetBSD well."
>
> Can you elaborate on this a bit? (not to hijack this thread). You are
> saying to get full 32 bit address space I need to get the 32bit enabled
> ROM?  I thought the address li nes were not even there?
> Can one still get NetBSD for the SE30?
> Am interested as sometime in the future am considering setting up a MOF
> server to install an OS on some bare metal VAXes I have.  In any event,
> just having the SE30 fired up again would be cool.
> Thanks
> J


You don't technically need a 32-bit clean ROM for NetBSD thanks to a great
bit of software that was written many years ago by Connectix (the folks who
made VirtualPC and who were eventually bought by and became part of
Microsoft). The software is called Mode32 and it is capable of 'cleaning
up' the dirty ROMs on Macs like the SE/30 at boot:

http://lowendmac.com/daystar/pages/dsd_products/support/ts_mode32.html

While it requires the classic Mac OS to load so it can do it's thing, with
NetBSD that's fine since the NetBSD mac68k boot loader runs from inside
MacOS (so any 68k Mac first needs to boot into Mac OS and then it can
reboot into NetBSD):

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/mac68k/booter-manual/index.html

Mode32 was originally a commercial product but was made free many years
ago. I have a copy at home in my archives, but it you search around the net
there are downloads.

The only advantage to searching out the rare 32-bit clean IIsi ROM and
using it in an SE/30 would be to run things like AU/X 3.1.1, which requires
a 32-bit clean ROM. In case anyone is curious about AU/X, here's a tour
someone wrote up a number of years ago:

http://toastytech.com/guis/aux.html

- Nate