Sun 4/330 revisited...

Jules Richardson julesrichardsonuk at yahoo.co.uk
Mon Apr 4 05:58:18 CDT 2005


On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 18:43 +0100, Tony Duell wrote:
> > 
> > 
> > Right. It's *not* the 8530 SCC chip that's faulty, but it's *not* the
> > data bus either - there's plenty of bus activity so bit 6 isn't
> > permanently jammed high.
> > 
> > After checking the bus, I replaced the SCC chip with a socket and tried
> > my spare SCC chip from home (remarkably easy job as it turned out) -
> > gave exactly the same results on the console.
> 
> 
> First thought : There's some other device -- maybe soemthing like an 
> interrupt vector source buffer -- that's being enabled along with the 
> Z8530. Of course this might be inside that LSI chip you mention.

Mention of interrupts is interesting...

Actually, the machine has two SCC chips (each having two ports) for a
total of four serial ports. One daisy-chains the interrupt line from the
other.

What I thought was the bad SCC (which runs the console port #1 and
serial port #2) is actually at the end of the chain - I suppose it's
possible that the other SCC (running ports #3 and #4) is causing
problems.

I'll see where else that interrupt line goes to too...

> > I can't do much about 1 and 2 without knowing the pinouts of the LSI
> > chip or having full schematics of the board :-(
> 
> Well, there's a winter-evening project for you -- draw out the 
> schematics. 

Problem is there are a lot of unknowns on the board - at least 30 PAL
chips, plus a handful of Sun chips having around 200 pins each for which
there are likely no specs in the public domain :-(  

Of course, tracing as much as I can to do with the serial circuitry
might be an option, and may show up some useful things to test. 

cheers

Jules



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