Very IBMish. It looks like I need to call my service representative.
The megapel adapter worked just fine in the diagnostic. It is just the display that has a few issues. The D drive, an E70 ESDI drive seems to be toast. The C drive, a H310 drive, is passing all the diagnostics.
It diags keeps complaining about card moved or not present. I removed the MDA card, the 5080 card and the Lighted Keyboard (aka quad async board) and then moved the 6157 board. It just doesn't seem to stick when I tell I have removed or moved them. Why is not the 6157 detected in its new position? Strange.
For now it just detects the newly installed Megapel board (slot 4/5) , the token ring board (slot 8) and the ESDI board (slot 1). The 6157 board in slot 2 is not detected. Strange. Does the 6157 streamer need to be connected to have the board detected? I guess not, but one cannot be sure.
It won't boot. Bear wrote that it will IPL without battery in place so I guess that with a good working bootable drive in C it should boot. Even though the C drive is working so I guess that this means that the drive is wiped, right? I have removed the non-working E70 in D but that didn't help. Still no boot.
Next step would be to try to do a new install of AIX and see if I can make it boot then. In the long run I would like to replace the H310 with CF flash disks if possible. There is the R40 and R70 which in my interpretation would be MFM disks. Possibly these could be emulated on a CF card connected to a IDE adapter? I thought the diagnostics disk would allow me to configure the disks connected to the system like one could do with the IBM AT. But it appears not be the case. On the other hand the ESDI allow you to read out the drive type from the drive so in the case for ESDI it would not be necessary. But how does the RT handle MFM disks?? Where is the disk geometry specified?
I don't have the humongous 5081 nearby. It is a SONY Trinitron screen. But there are pictures of the 5081 online. Like this picture from CHM:
The difference is that my to be setup is to connect the 5081 monitor (the one to the right) directly to the IBM RT PC using the Megapel board.
I have picked up parts for this system over the years. I got the 6150 some 8 years ago. Since it was a B25 it had the 5080 interface stuff in it. Back in the early 90ies I got the 5081 screen which I connected to a Linux 386 machine running XFree86 back then. Made a small VGA to sync-on-green device that connected it to the PC VGA card. I then tweaked the XFree86 config to get a proper display. The 5081 is extremely heavy and deep. Not anything that you place on a normal desk.
A few years back snuci gave me a heads up on a Ebay auction for the Megapel board. Thanks!
From a 6151 which had a severe battery accident I have a Ungermann Bass ethernet board and the keyboard and mouse.
So this to be system is parts that has been picked up along the way and I hope that I can make an old workstation system running X11 on it.
BTW. Is it possible to run two screen on a RT? I still have that high res mono screen (and screen adapter) that came with the 6151. (The screen to the left in the picture above)