[rescue] Sun 3/80 Schematics

[Bill Dorsey]

Hi Alex,

That wouldn't be too difficult for Sun 3 systems where schematics already exist (e.g. 3/50, 3/60).
Not really possible for the 3/80 unless schematics turn up or unless someone has an extra 3/80
which can be sacrificed at the altar of reverse engineering.  There are places which will take a
depopulated board, scan it, and create schematics from the scan.  In the case of multilayer boards,
they will strip each layer off and scan it repeatedly until they have all layers.  Not sure about the
costs as I have never had it done, but I know it exists as a service.  In the case of the 3/80, there
are also SPLDs present.  It is possible that they can be read after the chips are depopulated so that
duplicates may be made and/or CUPL code generated for those who might like to modify them (that would
be me).

I don't hold out much hope that schematics for the 3/80 will turn up nor that the reverse engineering
route will bear any fruit, so I'm going to try to track down some documentation for the P4 bus on the
3/80.  I'll have to remove my framebuffer since there is only one slot in the computer, but it should
let me do what I'm looking to do.  If I really wanted to keep the framebuffer I'd look at using the
SCSI bus instead at the cost of much higher I/O latency.

- Bill

On 10/15/19 1:03 PM, J. Alexander Jacocks wrote:

> Another interesting project might be to make a new Sun 3 motherboard, based
> on the original.  This has been done successfully for several other
> machines, particularly the Amiga 3000, which is similarly 68030 based.
>
> http://www.reamiga.info/
>
> I'd be very interesting in helping on such a project, if anyone is
> interested.
>
> - Alex