Hi! I'm Caleb from VCFed. I've got a NeXTStation Turbo that I got with a lot of other stuff that I'd like to get running properly for a friend. I brought it to Rob's place (black hole, inc), conveniently for me I live quite close to him. I got the hardware I needed, but declined the OS, both to save money and because I would like to know the system better. And I have quite a bit of hardware at my place. So, I believe I will need to either boot into the ROM Monitor and tell it to boot from SCSI CD drive, or boot into ROM Monitor, tell it to boot from FDD, then use that to run the installation from the CD drive?
Right now I cannot get into the ROM Monitor. I have tried pressing both command+tilde and shift+command+tilde at various times, but it acts like I don't exist. I wonder if the ROM might be the suspect, what do you guys think? I have ROM 3.3 v71. When at Rob's house, it booted to an OS on an HDD he had and worked fine, but I'm not sure we booted to the ROM Monitor thingy when the HDD was not plugged in. So I might just be doing something wrong, but do you think v71 would work with the ADB monitor/keyboard? It's model N4000B and I have no sound box.
Try this left alternate key , Command , ~ I made a video here on how to
https://youtu.be/LgL4xaS0Ykk Best Regards Rob Blessin
Tried it, thanks for the video! Still no luck. I'd post a video, but it looks like what you'd expect it to if you pressed no keys.
Alright, finally got it working, thanks! It refused to get to the ROM monitor in ROM v71, but I got a ROM v74 chip and it worked fine.
I've had a crazy time trying to get an OS on though, everything I do causes errors. I thought I'd just connect a SCSI drive via an HD50 to Centronics 50 adapter, burn a NeXTStep disk, and boot it, but it's failed. Typing "bfd" it said scsi not found. on bsd(1,0,0), bsd(2,0,0) and bsd(3,0,0) it says "waiting for drive to come ready" forever. Thats with no HDD in it. with HDD it said something about not being able to load sdmach. My CD-ROM is a AppleCD 300 Plus in a generic enclosure set to ID 3.
Hello: Typing bfd should boot the floppy disk then it should say bad magic and find the cdrom drive, the cd should spin up and find the hard drive . You may have to format the hard drive and set the TErmination power and bus jumpers.
What make and model of scsi hard drive is it? Best regards Rob Blessin
You can also try booting direct from the cdrom drive to start the install using
bsd(n,0,0)sdmach rootdev=sdna where n scsi id number of your cdrom drive
setting it to scsi id 6 is good.
QuoteHello: Typing bfd should boot the floppy disk then it should say bad magic and find the cdrom drive, the cd should spin up and find the hard drive . You may have to format the hard drive and set the TErmination power and bus jumpers.
What make and model of scsi hard drive is it? Best regards Rob Blessin
You can also try booting direct from the cdrom drive to start the install using
bsd(n,0,0)sdmach rootdev=sdna where n scsi id number of your cdrom drive
setting it to scsi id 6 is good.
Thanks! The bfd worked great. The issues I had were, of course check the SCSI ID, also it's interesting to not my Apple CD drive did not work (I think it was called 300+?), it may have been faulty, but lucky for me a Toshiba XM series drive worked. The Apple hard drives I have on hand work, I had issues with Micropolis and IBM ones. I installed to a 700MB disk, that worked but was too small, then now I am trying a 1.2GB one - I do believe that will be big enough and it's currently running fine.
An Apple mouse did not work reliably, but a MacALLY one is; I do not have a NeXT one.
The next question is software. I'm giving this system to a guy who primarily programs for his 2012 Macbook Pro so if it's possible I'd like to install the objective C tools needed to make Macintosh apps. And again, I know nothing at all about programming. Can the NeXT program Mac apps? In the dev CD I only saw settings for NeXT, RISC, and x86 - does the RISC thingy include Macs? Is the dev CD even the thing to use for programming or is it something else?
Overall I need to make sure he has a path to get his own software onto it. So,
is there a guide for installing dev tools?
Can I use a PC to download .tar.gz files from the archive or will the contact with a PC ruin my life?
Can I use a PC to write tar.gz files to floppy disk and put them on the NeXT that way? Can the NeXT decompress tar.gz files without new software?
Is there a guide to getting it onto the internet or networked? I with to transfer files over either an internet server or a NAS or network computer, but I don't even understand it's file browser, its too simplistic. It would be fine if it could network with a PC or Mac.
Rob recommended I check the Library, but as far as I can tell there is nothing in the NeXT's library besides an example address file.
Quote from: JinnaiQuote
The next question is software. I'm giving this system to a guy who primarily programs for his 2012 Macbook Pro so if it's possible I'd like to install the objective C tools needed to make Macintosh apps. And again, I know nothing at all about programming. Can the NeXT program Mac apps? In the dev CD I only saw settings for NeXT, RISC, and x86 - does the RISC thingy include Macs? Is the dev CD even the thing to use for programming or is it something else?
Overall I need to make sure he has a path to get his own software onto it. So,
is there a guide for installing dev tools?
Can I use a PC to download .tar.gz files from the archive or will the contact with a PC ruin my life?
Can I use a PC to write tar.gz files to floppy disk and put them on the NeXT that way? Can the NeXT decompress tar.gz files without new software?
Is there a guide to getting it onto the internet or networked? I with to transfer files over either an internet server or a NAS or network computer, but I don't even understand it's file browser, its too simplistic. It would be fine if it could network with a PC or Mac.
Rob recommended I check the Library, but as far as I can tell there is nothing in the NeXT's library besides an example address file.
I prefer some kind of NFS or Novel Netware 3.x server which NeXTSTEP can happily mount.
Ah. Maybe I'll look into that some time (I don't have one set up right now).