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Digital Personal Workstation 500a Conversion to au?

I believe you just have to put Unix or vms compatible cards in it. The main things are the scsi card and graphics card, I think.

I never had a pws, but I had a similar spec’ed system, based on the PC164LX motherboard instead, and it had LSI53C895 scsi, Elsa gloria graphics, and Dec/intel Ethernet. It would boot either windows, tru64, or openvms.
 
You make sure your I/O cards are compatible with the non-Windows OS you want to run, and then set the machine to boot the SRM console instead of the ARC console. That's it.

The 500a/au is one of the machines that can have both the ARC and SRM console software flashed simultaneously. I don't know if the 500a shipped with the SRM console code flashed in. If not, trying to switch the first time will prompt you to insert flash update floppies. IIRC. You only have to do that once; after it has both consoles loaded you can switch between them at will. There's no lockout PAL like there is on e.g. the NT-only AS4x00 processor boards.
 
I had one of these once. I gave it away in 2017 when I moved to DFW area from SW Ohio. The PWS500a was Windows NT and the PWS500aw was meant for Digital UNIX, but would also run OpenVMS. As jafir mentioned, it was the SCSI and video cards that made the difference. I had a QLogic QLA1020 in mine, but there were a couple of others that would work as well. Though I can't remember them offhand. The PWS500 is all PCI, I think. There may have been one ISA slot that went unused because there wasn't anything that worked with OpenVMS that fit. I may be remembering wrong.

For video, I think any of the then current PCI video cards would work. The Elsa Gloria was popular. There was a Cirrus S3Trio (?) that also worked I think. A PCI ATI Radeon 7500 works, but you have to find one actually made by ATI, NOT a clone. It makes a difference. I think the ethernet is built in on the main board, if not a DE500 card works and is about the best you can do even if it is only 10Mb

Some documentation I found

https://manx-docs.org/collections/mds-199909/cd1/alpha/dpwstupa.pdf - looks promising but really doesn't have a lot of info other thatn the OpenVMS version
 
bear said:
You make sure your I/O cards are compatible with the non-Windows OS you want to run, and then set the machine to boot the SRM console instead of the ARC console. That's it.

The 500a/au is one of the machines that can have both the ARC and SRM console software flashed simultaneously. I don't know if the 500a shipped with the SRM console code flashed in. If not, trying to switch the first time will prompt you to insert flash update floppies. IIRC. You only have to do that once; after it has both consoles loaded you can switch between them at will. There's no lockout PAL like there is on e.g. the NT-only AS4x00 processor boards.
Click to expand...
I don't think SRM is loaded right now; displays the PWS screen then goes to AlphaBIOS first off, no settings in there that would allow me to go to SRM. I'm looking for firmware, haven't found it yet... might you have any insights?
 
Have you tried this:

Switching from Windows NT to DIGITAL UNIX
To switch from the Windows NT operating system to DIGITAL UNIX, follow these steps:
1. From Windows NT, choose Shut down.
2. Restart the computer.
3. Press [F2] to enter AlphaBIOS Setup.
4. To change console selection, from the Setup menu, choose CMOS Setup.
5. Press [Enter].
6. Press [F6] to enter Advanced Setup.
7. Tab to Console Selection.
8. Select Digital UNIX (SRM).
9. Press [F10] twice to save your selections.
10. Press [Enter].
11. Press [Esc] to exit Setup.
12. Power cycle the machine.
NOTE: Wait 45 seconds before turning the system back on.
13. The SRM console prompt >>> displays
Click to expand...

Pages 3-28/29 in the first manual I linked to in my post.
 
lyonadmiral said:
Thanks, I should have taken the time to RTFM, that worked. I appreciate your guidance and patience.
Click to expand...
Sometimes you just can't tell what manual will help. Fortunately/unfortunately, there isn't much left out there for the PWS so it wasnt too hard.

I'm glad you were able to get it to work.
 
I'd guess for NT. VMS didn't get any good USB support until V8.3-ish and the hardware implementation in the PWS wasn't very good. It might not even work well under NT

There was a sound app/drivers in VMS back around V6 or 7 but I'm pretty sure it's no longer supported. You'd ahve to dig in the V6 or V7 docs to find out.

I don't know about Digital Unix support for either.
 
You wouldn't get any Windows NT support for USB on Alpha, unless you used an unreleased Alpha version of Windows 2000. Windows NT didn't support USB until Windows 2000, and Windows 2000 dropped Alpha support shortly before Windows 2000 was released.
 
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