<html><head><meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8"></head><body style="overflow-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; line-break: after-white-space;"><div><br id="lineBreakAtBeginningOfMessage"><div><br><blockquote type="cite"><div>On May 21, 2025, at 12:51, Dan Moisa via rescue <rescue@sunhelp.org> wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><div><div dir="auto">Thanks for the kind words everyone. I'll try to answer the questions in order:<div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">OS - Right now I'm netbooting sunos 4.1.1, but I'll try NetBSD as well. Aside from the missing peripherals it's a real 3/60 with no deviations at this point, so anything that runs on the original will run here. I'm engaged with another person outside of this list who's looking at the boot prom and has written a few bare-metal demos for it.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">RE: boards and making it available - absolutely. I have 4 additional boards from the initial run (min of 5 order) and I won't be needing all of them. The first run needs 2 trace corrections on the board itself (intermediate-level soldering) so for those interested I can patch the board and send it out/etc.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I'll post everything on Github - I have an almost-final version on there right now but it's not organized well, etc. I made the project with KiCAD, and I'll put all the schematics, etc. as well as consolidate the pal images, put up some build instructions (I spent a lot of time building incrementally and testing, and it was a lot of help).</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Right now it's a 4-layer board with signals on the top and bottom, which was the right call. I wanted to make sure I can fix small errors if I find them, and I did have 2 places where I had to change the connections to make it work. It was a pain to route it, I managed to do most of it with the autorouter in KiCAD but it took over 2 weeks of fiddling with it and the actual routing run took over 12 hours.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">Dave - I'll probably wire another one up, test it and ship it to you. I'm doing this purely for preservation and admiration for what the SUN folks did back in the day - having a computer from '87 with software from '92 able to get on the Internet today is quite something.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">The biggest issue was actually burning one of the PALs - I ended up wasting quite a bit of money on programmers to find one that actually works. Whoever wants one of those just tell me and I can ship you a set of burned PALs/GALs.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">RE: vintage or not, I'm somewhere in between. The first version I wanted to have it as close to the original as possible so I can easily test - I had no confidence that the schematics are complete and free of errors, and I did actually find a few but nothing major. Having it be similar to the original helped a lot because I could do knockout testing - remove components and see how it behaves, and test that I get the same behavior. It was also huge to be able to test the burned PALs, I had a few bugs in that as well. I also tried to keep more or less the same layout - compressing a bit of course.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I do want to modernize some sections - it desperately needs 4MB SIMMS at least, going to DIMMs would be quite a change in the design. I can put in a larger/flash boot ROM so it's easier to flash, a twisted pair transceiver straight on the board. There was a thought to compress some of the MMU/PAL logic into a few larger CPLDs but at that point I'd be looking for some more folks in a community that are interested :) I'm trying to document the principles of operation and design of the PALs (the RAM/DMA/refresh state machine, bus arbitration, address decoding, device enablement, etc) so it's easier to do such projects. I also need to fiddle with the originals if I'm to get larger SIMMs/etc anyway.</div><div dir="auto"><br></div><div dir="auto">I already have a standard molex power connector on it (not soldered right now because of the amount of incremental building and testing I did on it). It also only needs 5V and the 12V are only for Ethernet. It pulls about 3.5A (and negligible on 12v) while running a full load.</div></div></div></blockquote><br></div><div><font color="#000000">Absolutely amazing work, and I would of course like to build one myself. I\u2019d love to see the ethernet, video, keyboard and mouse back, so that it can be a fully functional workstation for someone to run SunOS 4 on. That would make the very low availability of the sun3 machines somewhat less of a problem for someone who wants to get started.</font></div><div><font color="#000000"><span style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></span></font></div><div><font color="#000000">And I\u2019d second the suggestion to skip 30 pin SIMMs and use 72 pin SIMMs instead. They are much easier to get in larger sizes. And, I\u2019d bet that 72 pin SIMM sockets are easier to get, as well.<br></font><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);"><br></div><div style="caret-color: rgb(0, 0, 0); color: rgb(0, 0, 0);">- Alex</div></div><br></div></body></html>