TI S1505 Info or interest

[bryanc806]

Hi,

Years (20+) ago I was given a TI S1505 system that had no drives, but included the S1505 motherboard, a multidrop card and I think another serial card. I was able to briefly at the time get the firmware to give me some info, but not able to do much else. I _think_ it still works, but the case had to be surrendered to the moving gods, so I just have the electronics now (e.g. boards and power supply)

All I've ever been able to find out about the system is located at http://www.home.unix-ag.org/engel/ti/

Is there another source of info, perhaps including some deeper technical information and/or OS images?

--bryan

 

[bifo86]

I'm not familiar with this series of unix machines but the linked page mentions that they were closely related to the Explorer LISP systems and I remembered that there is a working emulator for those: http://unlambda.com/lispm/
http://unlambda.com/index.php?n=Main.Meroko

You might find some more info about the TI Nubus implementations through that path, I seem to remember that most Nubus implementations were like eurocard and usually proprietary to the manufacturer.

 

[Al Kossow]

Do you have any way to take pictures of the boards that you have, or to dump the firmware in the eproms?
It probably has boards in common with the Explorer.

Do any of the boards look like those under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ti/explorer/pictures

I have scans of some 1500 manuals under
http://bitsavers.org/pdf/ti/1500

The software I was able to find is located here
http://bitsavers.org/bits/TI/S1500/

The other problem you will have is the software is node-locked with a hardware dongle.

Blowing the cobwebs out of my memory, I do have a 1505 board somewhere as well.
As Mike says on his page, these were single-board systems and not very much like the Explorer at all.

 

[bryanc806]

I'll dump the eproms shortly. There are 5 as the main board has 2 68010 cpus (for I/O processing?), and the main 68030.

Pics at:

http://clingman.org/ti1500/IMG_20200711_115739.jpg

http://clingman.org/ti1500/IMG_20200711_115811.jpg

http://clingman.org/ti1500/IMG_20200711_115830.jpg

 

[bryanc806]

I was able to grab the roms, but at least one seems to have some corruption based on the output of 'strings' on it.

Roms are at http://clingman.org/ti1500/roms/ the roms that are the upper and lower bytes of the 68010 processors are merged for convenience.

na21_na04.bin seems ok, but na127_nh127.bin has patterns like:

"Memory Tesi Failed"

and "Returnuvalue Failed"

nonetheless, I powered it up tonight and have the following bootlog:


RESET

Executing S1505 68030 F/W Rev *L in Slot C with 16MB memory

Selftest BEGINS
Test 00 RAM
*** WARNING No. 0060
Parity map corrupted or not initialized
-- Default map created

Test 01 PARITY passed
Test 02 ICC passed
Test 03 CACHE passed
Test 04 MAD passed
Test 05 TIMER

WARNING: 2 sec delay to init RTC. Do NOT <break>!

passed
Test 06 FPU passed
Test 07 NVRAM passed
Test 08 SPA
SPA not installed
passed
Test 09 C-ROM passed
Selftest COMPLETE



Slot C CPU TESTING SYSTEM:

Slot 8 CPO passed
Slot 9 SPC passed
Slot C CPU
*** WARNING No. 0060
Parity map corrupted or not initialized
-- Default map created
passed

Global ARB passed

D=Default load, M=Menu load, R=Retest, E=Extended tests :m
Available load devices

No online device

D=Default load, M=Menu load, R=Retest, E=Extended tests :
*** ERROR No. 0007
Overtemp interrupt
SR= 2700 PC= FCFED53E Format= 00 Offset= 022C
D0-D7= 000000C0 00000000 000000A8 00000000 FC000000 00000000 00000000 0000021B
A0-A7= 00000258 FCFFF668 C0FFDAB4 FCFE040C C0FF8FB8 C0FF8C9C C0FF893C C0FF88D4
Processor STOPed




So, I have two issues now.... the temperature shutdown, which seemed to be way ahead of its time, and for the boot, a 1G SCSI disk was attached and properly terminated and the boot sequence cannot detect it. Maybe the corrupt ROM is an issue.

trying again later. I'll get a fan on the power supply and see if that is where the temperature sensor is.

--bryan

 

[bryanc806]

Al, thank you for the disk image and manuals! They were invaluable.

After a few adjustments (adding a fan), I can now get it to pass all self tests and get to the point in the boot when it checks for the hardware dongle (SPA in TI terminology).

the SCSI issue was solved by simply adding a jumper to auto-start the drive.

Now I need to figure out what to do with the thing.... It's a nice 68030 board, and the built-in monitor does allow you to download code as S-records. I've glanced at the docs and cannot find a list of callable routines (e.g. to print messages to the console, access disks etc.) I may have to start disassembling the main ROM...

--bryan