SparcStation Core

[kconger]

I was able to compile it. I don't think there are servers to connect to? The built-in server hostname it fails to connect to.

Does it work with a local server at least? From the INSTALL.TXT file:

Code: Select all

    Start a server first:

        xpilots -map globe.map

    Then start a client in another window:

        xpilot 

Reading through some old pages just now, it looks like the global matchmaking server was taken offline sometime after the 4.5.1 release:
http://www.j-a-r-n-o.nl/xpilotwarning.html

But I found page that lists several servers that are seemingly up!
http://xpilot.netarbeiter.com/

If that fails, this page has a few maps (maps are just the image) that could be run locally:
http://budwin.net/insectoid/xpilot/xpcmaps.html

Even if it is only to run it as a LAN game, it would be neat to resurrect XPilot for MiSTer

I'll try a local and remote server and will report back.

[kconger]

XPilot does work

20220503_085333-screen.png (127.14 KiB) Viewed 9217 times

Made a little launcher for the games that work at some level as well.

20220503_160056-screen.png (609.27 KiB) Viewed 9165 times

[Newsdee]

XPilot does work
Made a little launcher for the games that work at some level as well.

Amazing! It looks just like I remember it! I wonder if I've backed up my custom ship shape somewhere...

The launcher is a great idea; What other games would run on it.... is there still a repo of games like the old Blastwave server?

[kconger]

XPilot does work
Made a little launcher for the games that work at some level as well.

Amazing! It looks just like I remember it! I wonder if I've backed up my custom ship shape somewhere...

The launcher is a great idea; What other games would run on it.... is there still a repo of games like the old Blastwave server?

I'm looking for and adding more games as I find/test them. I just found that blastwave was archived on Archive.org. I'll see what I can add from the blastwave archive.

[cb88]

For sound you'd probably want to implement the Crystal 4231A codec... DBRI isn't well supported outside solaris. And the Sun4c audio is monaural only. In any case it won't be spectacular... and might even make sense to just implemeny something entirely different for NetBSD so it could get proper modern audio and maybe fit it in fewer luts.

The best you could do is CD quality stereo.... not that I've every been able to get that actually working on a real machine but that could just be me.

[cb88]

SparcV7 is for the Cypress 7C601 chipset?

With more recent FPGAs eval boards costing 200$€ to 500€$ it would be possible to be at least as fast as original hardware (100-200MHz). I'd like to test on a small Xilinx UltraScale+ board.

Not necessarily... Sparc v7 had many implementations just like V8. It should mostly just be V8 sans hardware mul/div which were optional back then. Other examples are ERC32 and Atmels rad hard TSC695 is a V7 I believe its an implementation of ERC32. ERC32 evolved into LEON.
http://microelectronics.esa.int/erc32/m ... -09-10.pdf

Also MB86900 predates the Cypress V7.

Weitek 3172A is a V7 a few variations of this one also I think.

There was also the BIT B5000 ECL 80Mhz implementation of Sparc pretty early on... an interesting doc to snag:
https://old.hotchips.org/wp-content/upl ... C1.1.2.pdf

I think the BIT B5000 was probably a Sparc v8... perhaps the first one. It was sort of a moonshot CPU that didn't quite make it... and might have been as fast as a SuperSparc II at the time the Supersparc was just coming out. It only made it into Floating Point Systems computers no Sun computers used it. A yes ... here we are its the brains of the Cray S-MP which itself was derived from a FPS Celerity 6000 architecture with ACCELL RISC processors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray_S-MP

[Newsdee]

I'm looking for and adding more games as I find/test them. I just found that blastwave was archived on Archive.org. I'll see what I can add from the blastwave archive.

That's great! A curated selection of nice / unique games would make the core even more interesting.

I think there was a version of angband for Solaris but I never tried it. I wonder if some older early games were ever ported too, eg. the original Collosal Cave Adventure, Kong [precursor to Lode Runner], or Oubliette (etc)

[cb88]

Unfortunately it looks like the cheaper Ultrascale boards lack PL ram.... similar to the Zync which has soc ram + the soldered FPGA ram.

It costs a couple hundred more to get ALINX AXU5EV-E which has PL and PS ram and a reasonble number of LUTs. Also thats about 117k LUTs maybe a bit more could fit than the De10-nano but probably not much.... if you ignore the base board (which I admit is quite nice and build your own) you could get the next version up with 230k luts for around 850 and that would comfortably fit 6 cores + a bunch more.... but then you'd be designing a base board.... its a few hundred for for their base board but might be worth it.

[kconger]

I'm looking for and adding more games as I find/test them. I just found that blastwave was archived on Archive.org. I'll see what I can add from the blastwave archive.

That's great! A curated selection of nice / unique games would make the core even more interesting.

I think there was a version of angband for Solaris but I never tried it. I wonder if some older early games were ever ported too, eg. the original Collosal Cave Adventure, Kong [precursor to Lode Runner], or Oubliette (etc)

Searched through the blastwave archive and was able to add a couple more games. At this point, I've got an optimized Solaris 8(Feb. 2004) image with PPP starting at boot and a mister user that auto starts the Launcher I created. The screenshot below, shows the games working at some level.

While searching for Solaris software I've found a bunch of NeXT software, once I can find a way to get it into an image and try to build a similar image for NeXT OS.

S8.png (588.12 KiB) Viewed 8950 times

[kconger]

Does this run MAE (Macintosh Application Environment) like seen in this video?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VH5HVNq23sk

Found a copy of MAE 3.0.4, seems to run well in the core.

SS5-MAE.png (537.85 KiB) Viewed 8830 times

[thorr]

Those screenshots are making me want to try this core! I would love to get SDRC I-DEAS going on it (my favorite CAD software), although I doubt I will be able to even find it and a license for it. Can you change the lmhostid like you can on a real Sun? It would be very cool to try the iD games too!

[Grabulosaure]

I have updated the SS5 core.
https://github.com/Grabulosaure/ss
http://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/ss5.rbf

- CDROM now works with Solaris (8), NextSTEP, Linux (RH). To mount the CD with Solaris, type : " mount -F hsfs -r /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0 /cdrom", for old Linux, it's "/dev/scd0"
It should be possible to test NextSTEP software by creating an ISO image.
I haven't tried yet to install an OS from CDROM images, it would be useful for NextSTEP as it doesn't work with QEMU (this image is the copy of the SCSI disk of a real SparcStation5).
- I've changed L2TLB control so that it can be enabled/disabled at any time. NextSTEP isn't compatible, Solaris and Linux seem safe. There are a few other possible tweaks for better performance, I'm curious of the effects on real-time games.

@kconger
That's amazing! I've never played any game on Solaris... well, except those included in Emacs.

@cb88
Well. The BIT B5000. An ECL bipolar logic CPU. ECL was the fastest tech of that time, but horrendeous power draw. Fitting for supercalculators with liquid cooling and no consideration of the electricity bill.
For sound, the Crystal 4231A is indeed the best option. But the Sun STP2024 "APC" chip need also to be implemented, it handles register accesses and DMA, and I didn't found a complete datasheet (only the 15 pages abstract). Need to check OS and QEMU sources to understand how it works.

[cb88]

@Grabulosaure "but horrendeous power draw."
Of course no holds barred for Cray and related companies. Of course by the time the supersparc-II came out ECL couldn't keep up and wasn't cost effective at all anymore.

I have a mister now and a 128MB ram module so I need to finally get this core running myself. I want to try running my gentoo build on it also which ran OK on a Sparcstation LX so should be similar.

[Alkadian]

Could someone please be so kind as to point me to a Solaris 8 image?

Thanks a lot!

[kconger]

- CDROM now works with Solaris (8), NextSTEP, Linux (RH). To mount the CD with Solaris, type : " mount -F hsfs -r /dev/dsk/c0t6d0s0 /cdrom", for old Linux, it's "/dev/scd0"
It should be possible to test NextSTEP software by creating an ISO image.
I haven't tried yet to install an OS from CDROM images, it would be useful for NextSTEP as it doesn't work with QEMU (this image is the copy of the SCSI disk of a real SparcStation5).
- I've changed L2TLB control so that it can be enabled/disabled at any time. NextSTEP isn't compatible, Solaris and Linux seem safe. There are a few other possible tweaks for better performance, I'm curious of the effects on real-time games.

@Grabulosaure Thanks for this update! I was able to create an iso with NeXTStep software and mount it under your Next image. I tried to test OS installs, but unfortunately, I can't seem to get my known working Solaris 8 iso or a couple of NeXT 3.3 ISOs to boot. I tried the openbios command "boot cdrom:d" and "boot cdrom" with no luck.

[kevind]

I am in the same boat. I noticed that it did appear to attempt to read the SD card when I tried “boot cdrom” vs “boot sd0/sd1/sd6/scd0/etc” but I got the same error in all cases.

[Grabulosaure]

@kconger, @kevind
I've found the problem. Some bug that I introduced in OpenBIOS when trying to optimise disk accesses, which broke CDROM with 2048 bytes. Boot.rom need to be updated.

https://github.com/Grabulosaure/ss_openbios
http://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS/boot.rom

Type "boot cdrom:d" on OpenBIOS prompt. It's quite slow.

@Alkadian
http://temlib.org/pub/mister/SS. Password is the OS name, uppercase and lowercase characters.

@cb88. Great!
You will be hooked on all the amazing cores on MiSTer : Game consoles, retro computers... Countless great games on Genesis or SNES and many more. The framework allows much more convenient access with disk and ROM images, settings menus, than a bare metal FPGA board.

[kevind]

@grabulosaure
That did it. I was able to boot my Solaris 8 CD and format a newly created 2GB raw disk before it became too late to finish.

For those of you playing at home, my process so far has been to create a raw image with qemu:
qemu-img create -f raw sol8.raw 2G

After booting the CD as shown above, the installer will fail because of a non formatted disk and drop you to a bash prompt. Format the disk with 259 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 63 heads and 255 sectors per track. Label it and it should be ready to accept an OS.

While I trust my Solaris CD, I tried a different OpenStep CD that I had found “laying around” and the core didn’t like it. I know for a fact it is a non-standard ISO because the ao486 core rejects it as well; on that core I was able to convert it to a CHD and then it read fine.

EDIT:
Came back to give it one try before bed, but it looks like 2GB isn’t going to be large enough to hold the installation, so the above instructions will not work.

[kconger]

@grabulosaure I can also confirm it's working for me as well. I was able to boot my Solaris 8 iso and a NeXT install iso. Trying the NeXT install this morning, it's currently copying files. I hope to build a NeXTStep image with PPP, dev tools, and games.

UPDATE
NextStep 3.3 installed fine. It doesn't reboot after installation, but if you wait to make sure you give it time to unmount, then restart the core it will boot up. Doing much in NextStep is difficult as it seems to lock up often and can corrupt the disk.

[georgemog]

@grabulosaure I also can confirm that the CDROM Is working. I got as far as copying over the Solaris 8 mini-root. Is there any reason why reboot causes the core to hang and reset from the OSD does nothing?

Keep up the good work, I am loving this core.

[SIDKidd]

Wow! Amazing work @grabulosaure!
I just love to explore systems I've never seen/owned
What's the user/pass logon for the solaris image?

EDIT: D'OH! What a dummy am I...just press the help button at Logon

[douglasamcintosh]

...

After booting the CD as shown above, the installer will fail because of a non formatted disk and drop you to a bash prompt. Format the disk with 259 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 63 heads and 255 sectors per track. Label it and it should be ready to accept an OS.

...

EDIT:
Came back to give it one try before bed, but it looks like 2GB isn’t going to be large enough to hold the installation, so the above instructions will not work.

Is there a forumla to work out the number of cylinders / alt cylinders / heads / sectors that we need for custom size drive images? That would be handy.

[georgemog]

After a couple of days, trying to install Solaris 8 I have finally cracked it. The problem is that the reset function on the core doesn't work but the installer passes the details of the slice information in the reboot command. Once the mini root is installed, reboot has run and the system has hung. Reboot MiSTer and restart the core with just the virtual disk. Turn autoboot off and let it run. When OpenBoot has started run the command boot disk:b and the system will boot off the mini root.

Still working on the next bit as my disk was a bit too small.

[kevind]

...

After booting the CD as shown above, the installer will fail because of a non formatted disk and drop you to a bash prompt. Format the disk with 259 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 63 heads and 255 sectors per track. Label it and it should be ready to accept an OS.

...

EDIT:
Came back to give it one try before bed, but it looks like 2GB isn’t going to be large enough to hold the installation, so the above instructions will not work.

Is there a forumla to work out the number of cylinders / alt cylinders / heads / sectors that we need for custom size drive images? That would be handy.

So first thing of note is that it is a raw file, so we don’t have to worry too much about what the numbers physically mean other than the potential controller limitations. I basically took what I thought were reasonable defaults and just did the multiplication out to get as close to 2G as possible without going over. It is interesting to note that I got heads and sectors per track backwards due to time of day, I should have configured it as 255 heads and 63 sectors. The total number came out correctly, though. It is a 512B sector size, so 512 sectors * 63 sectors per track * 255 heads * n cylinders to get your hard drive size defined. Then subtract 2 from the cylinders and make those alternate.

Going back later, I looked at what the working Solaris 7 2G image used and it was 63 sectors, 16 heads and 4092 cylinders. Given that I don’t know if there are any controller limitations on the individual counts, my suggestion (and what I plan to do later today) is to generate a 2.9G image and just use the SUN2.9 default that is in the format list.

[Grabulosaure]

...

After booting the CD as shown above, the installer will fail because of a non formatted disk and drop you to a bash prompt. Format the disk with 259 cylinders, 2 alternate cylinders, 63 heads and 255 sectors per track. Label it and it should be ready to accept an OS.

...

EDIT:
Came back to give it one try before bed, but it looks like 2GB isn’t going to be large enough to hold the installation, so the above instructions will not work.

Is there a forumla to work out the number of cylinders / alt cylinders / heads / sectors that we need for custom size drive images? That would be handy.

So first thing of note is that it is a raw file, so we don’t have to worry too much about what the numbers physically mean other than the potential controller limitations. I basically took what I thought were reasonable defaults and just did the multiplication out to get as close to 2G as possible without going over. It is interesting to note that I got heads and sectors per track backwards due to time of day, I should have configured it as 255 heads and 63 sectors. The total number came out correctly, though. It is a 512B sector size, so 512 sectors * 63 sectors per track * 255 heads * n cylinders to get your hard drive size defined. Then subtract 2 from the cylinders and make those alternate.

Going back later, I looked at what the working Solaris 7 2G image used and it was 63 sectors, 16 heads and 4092 cylinders. Given that I don’t know if there are any controller limitations on the individual counts, my suggestion (and what I plan to do later today) is to generate a 2.9G image and just use the SUN2.9 default that is in the format list.

I don't know what Solaris does with that information, but on hardware level, it's meaningless.
It's not like old IDE with CHS values for selecting cylinders, sectors, heads.

SCSI disk commands just have "sector address" parameter :
- READ/WRITE(6) : 21bits sector address => 1GB max size (512 bytes sectors)
- READ/WRITE(10) : 32bits sector address => 2TB max size (512 bytes sectors)
(There is also a READ/WRITE(16) with 64bits index, but it's not supported by the core, and I doubt any OS would use it.)
That sector address is forwarded to the MiSTer FW for accessing disk image files or the SD card controller for direct access to an SD card on the IO board.
There is no other limitation in the HW.

[georgemog]

Success at last! I have installed Solaris 8 after many missteps. This is what I did:-
1. I used the following Media Size Calculator to come up with a rough idea of what the disk should look like.

http://www.csgnetwork.com/mediasizecalc.html

An example that they give is - WD Caviar AC28400 Drive H=16, C=16383, S=63, B=512, Size=8.4GB

2. I then used fallocate to create the disk file. The command that I used was:-

fallocate -l 5264179200 test.raw

3. Start the SS5 core and boot the Solaris 8 install disk. SS5 options:-
AutoBoot = no
CDROM ISO = 'Solaris 8 Installation HW 7-03 SPARC (705-0540-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso'
HD = test.raw

4. At the OpenBoot prompt - enter the following

boot cdrom:d

5. The CD-ROM image will load and it will try to recognise the disk. It will then fail and leave you with a console window open and command prompt. Enter the command format. It will show the hardware path to the disk and a number. Enter that number and it will ask you questions about the disk. This is where the information from step 1 come in useful. Although it refused to allow the disk to be labeled because it stated that there was a geometry mismatch.

I ran the sub command "type" and respecified it with half the cylinders. The "label" subcommand failed again, but the "format" sub command worked. This was time to leave the format command to do its thing. 2.5 hours later I had a disk.

6. When the format sub command has finished, type quit and run the following.

cd /sbin
./cd0_install

7. This will restart the installer script and it should recognise the new disk. It will ask if you want to partition it. Accept the default answers. It will then copy mini-root into the swap partition. When done it will reboot (or should if reboot were working).

8. Reboot the core and use the following options

AutoBoot = no
CDROM ISO = 'Solaris 8 Software HW 7-03 SPARC (Disc 1)(705-0553-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso'
HD = test.raw

9. At the OpenBoot prompt - enter the following

boot disk:b

(I don't know what the :b does but it works. I vaguely remember that it is the partition slice a=whole disk, b=part 1, c=part 2 etc)

10. It should boot and a long install is ahead of you. Follow the instructions. You can change the disks from the OSD menu. The problem that I had was that my 'Solaris 8 Software Supplement HW 7-03 SPARC (705-0541-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso' image was not readable.

To save you the effort here is the disk image, if you would like to use it. The login is root and password is root

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IeVL0N ... sp=sharing

[Alkadian]

Success at last! I have installed Solaris 8 after many missteps. This is what I did:-
1. I used the following Media Size Calculator to come up with a rough idea of what the disk should look like.

http://www.csgnetwork.com/mediasizecalc.html

An example that they give is - WD Caviar AC28400 Drive H=16, C=16383, S=63, B=512, Size=8.4GB

2. I then used fallocate to create the disk file. The command that I used was:-

fallocate -l 5264179200 test.raw

3. Start the SS5 core and boot the Solaris 8 install disk. SS5 options:-
AutoBoot = no
CDROM ISO = 'Solaris 8 Installation HW 7-03 SPARC (705-0540-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso'
HD = test.raw

4. At the OpenBoot prompt - enter the following

boot cdrom:d

5. The CD-ROM image will load and it will try to recognise the disk. It will then fail and leave you with a console window open and command prompt. Enter the command format. It will show the hardware path to the disk and a number. Enter that number and it will ask you questions about the disk. This is where the information from step 1 come in useful. Although it refused to allow the disk to be labeled because it stated that there was a geometry mismatch.

I ran the sub command "type" and respecified it with half the cylinders. The "label" subcommand failed again, but the "format" sub command worked. This was time to leave the format command to do its thing. 2.5 hours later I had a disk.

6. When the format sub command has finished, type quit and run the following.

cd /sbin
./cd0_install

7. This will restart the installer script and it should recognise the new disk. It will ask if you want to partition it. Accept the default answers. It will then copy mini-root into the swap partition. When done it will reboot (or should if reboot were working).

8. Reboot the core and use the following options

AutoBoot = no
CDROM ISO = 'Solaris 8 Software HW 7-03 SPARC (Disc 1)(705-0553-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso'
HD = test.raw

9. At the OpenBoot prompt - enter the following

boot disk:b

(I don't know what the :b does but it works. I vaguely remember that it is the partition slice a=whole disk, b=part 1, c=part 2 etc)

10. It should boot and a long install is ahead of you. Follow the instructions. You can change the disks from the OSD menu. The problem that I had was that my 'Solaris 8 Software Supplement HW 7-03 SPARC (705-0541-10)(Sun Microsystems, Inc.)(July 2003).iso' image was not readable.

To save you the effort here is the disk image, if you would like to use it. The login is root and password is root

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1IeVL0N ... sp=sharing

Many thanks for sharing these steps. Very useful indeed!

The image also worked like a charm!

[kconger]

Here is my optimized Solaris 8 image as well, I have been slowly working on a NeXTStep image that I will add here as well.

https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

Update

Added a NeXTStep image as well.

[rolopolo]

I have a real ss10 here on my desk. I am no expert in anything. I did get hold of it run Nextstep but only an 8 bit gfx card. Amazed you installed Solaris 8. Takes an age on the ss10.

[broogle]

I am getting Next to boot just fine. However, I can't get a mouse to work. I have a generic USB mouse plugged in and when I move it, I get the MiSTer notification "P1 paddle/spinner" so I know MiSTer is recognizing it. Any ideas? Thank you for your awesome work!!!