A4000T rear card

[Will-i-am]

Man, I'm posting stuff like crazy these days. But here's another question that I know I knew a couple of years ago but have lost the answer. On the board attached to the inside rear of the Tower are ports serial, parallel, joystick and mouse. There is also a 50 something port on the side facing the power supply. Looks almost like an IDE port but is not mentioned in the manual anywhere I can find. What does it do, or does it do anything? I know there are some things never implemented on some boxes, but this board is also not exactly as they show in the manual anyway. The pins to which you would attach sound from a CD drive is not where they show it, for instance.

[Jeff]

That is a terminator for the internal SCSI interface if I am not mistaken.

Jeff

[X-ray]

Jeff is right.
Another user here (I can't remember who) cut that board so that the terminator was free, thus enabling the use of the little D-sub cutting in the case (which was previously obscured). That's nice if you have a non-zorro graphics card for instance.

[Will-i-am]

x-ray, woof, I feel like a pre-schooler wandering in a college classroom. Okay, what's a d-sub cutting in the case? I have to assume you're talking about the 4 openings behind the board that are plugged at the moment, right? I'm still confused somewhat (read thick headed). It looks just like a socket with  50 pins....How does it terminate? I have this old Intergraph workstation which I took apart and it has a cable from the HD with a clunky chrome box about 1/2" by 1/2" in cross section plugged into the end of the cable and I thought that was what a scsi terminator looked like. Let's face it, I'm a sculptor who specializes in wood fired ceramics. My knowlege of the inner workings of computers is much the same as my knowlege of cars: I can change the oil and spark plugs. With computers I can install cards and drives. What makes them work is a mystery to me. Anyway, thanks for the info! If you ever want to know how to build and fire a noborigama kiln, don't hesitate to ask. 8-)

[X-ray]

@ Will-I-Am

The cuttings at the back of the case that are obstructed, are the same size as a PC VGA port, so if you had for instance a CybervisionPPC in your A4KT, you could run the output to that opening if the SCSI terminator part of the ports module wasn't in the way.
The black connector (the 50 pin one on the ports module) is where you would plug the last connector on a SCSI ribbon cable, for termination. So you would have a setup like this:

50 pin connector on disks module ------> SCSI HD --------> 50 pin connector on ports module.

That is with one device and with a ribbon cable with 3 connectors. In other words it is a terminator for internal SCSI devices that are on a 50-pin ribbon.

[PaSha]

Yup, this is in fact an Active SCSI terminator (there's a bunch of resistors on it), and if you look closely (take the PCB out of the case) you can see that it is actually meant to be a separate PCB, and is labelled somthing like C= SCSI terminator board rev 1. In fact, it looks a lot like the scsi terminator C= shipped with the A4091 SCSI controller.
It can be safely cut off (I've cut mine off) to enable usage of the port cutouts that are obstructed by it.

-Paul

[Markus_Bieler]

Yes its indedd an active scsi terminator. And I had to cut it off to install the connector for the CVPPC and the connector for the external-floppies

Markus

[Will-i-am]

Thanks a bunch, folks! As always I have learned more here about my Beast than I learned in weeks of Googling. When I first got my miggy, the old A2000 (still boots on the original setup) I had a few folks in a users group nearby who had the answers. Many were serious hardware hackers, overclockers and such. Now they are on to bigger and more modern PCs. (The quitters!) While I plod on trying to get my beefed up A4000s to be as reliable as the 1.3 A2000. Oddly enough I ran a drafting business off my A4000D for years before I started adding faster processors and CD drives and such. I still like the Cyberstorm, though, that PPC is sooo fast. The Beast remains an issue since there aren't many people in the world who know anything about that '060 card and the various pins and ports on it. I think once I get the Toaster 4000 running in it I will leave it alone! Thanks again.