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Comment by ruptwelve | Hacker News Reader

I had a lot of fun restoring this hunk of junk and trying to make it work. But there is still a long ways to go. Surprisingly there really NOT a lot of information out there on the Ultra 1. But do stay tuned for part 2.

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It saddens me to see the broken screen casing caused by careless transport. OTOH, if it still works I'd probably just use purple-blue gaffer tape to fix it, maybe even on all corners, to make it symmetric :-)

I thought briefly that I would not bother with VGA but use an X Server on a remote system to enjoy the Ultra. However then you would not be able to use the keyboard, which probably is half the fun? And does it have an optical mouse?

I used to have a Sun 3/60 at the end of the 90 gifted to me. It had a huge 21" black&white screen, and an optical mouse with two mouse pads with different grids, so you could pick the one you want for your preferred scroll speed.

Uhm, are you aware of

Ultra™ 1 Creator SeriesService Manual at

https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19127-01/ultra1.ws/802-4148-11/8... ?

edit: or rather https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19127-01/ultra1.ws/

I am! I used it extensively while fixing some of the issues here. It is nicely documented!

I believe that Sun (and SGI) machines using 13W3 connectors need a monitor supporting Sync-on-Green (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Component_video_sync).

Used to work at a place a long time ago with SGI Irix boxes connected to LCD panels; Iiyama panels supported SoG at the time and were the ones we used. Hope that helps, good luck!

I distinctly remember soldering a resistor to a Sun SBUS graphics card to make it send sync-on-green to an SGI monitor (both 13W3); I think SGI used SOG, and Sun didn’t.

Ah, OK - I stand corrected.

Thanks for sharing this!

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