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Besta series (Besta-88 and Besta-90) of engineering workstations. Former was a deskside model, latter a desktop.

Design was apparently licensed from Force Computers GmbH (SYS68K series).

These were 68020- and 68030-based graphics workstations with VME bus. Ran mostly UNIX (System V R3.1), OS9 apparently was in use too. Linux 2.0 was ported much later, by a customer.

No known emulator. Lots of unemulated chips -- 68230 PIT, 68561 MPCC, 62421 RTC, 6850 ACIA, Intersil ICM7170 ...

Graphics cards were optional, the machines could be run headless (with up to 24? directly connected serial terminals).

Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Besta_(computer) (not much there)

Technical manuals, Linux port (binary and source): http://ftp.stu.neva.ru/besta/

Pictures: http://picasaweb.google.com/areytman/Besta and http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/bushjr/album/53018

Linux booting: http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/shattered/view/467341

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Nice! Are there dumps?

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None that I know of, but I do have access to these machines and spares. Will see if these can be dumped easily.

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Originally Posted by shattered
None that I know of, but I do have access to these machines and spares. Will see if these can be dumped easily.

Please make sure that you check for any ROMs on the graphics boards as well. Although the CPU boards most likely have the boot ROMs, it's likely that there is some sort of graphics microcode, too.

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Will do. The manuals say that SCSI controller and multi-port serial cards have ROMS too -- SCSI card has a 68010 that drives a NCR 5386S, and serial card's 68562 chips are also driven by 68010.

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There are dumps after all, here. These are from CP31 CPU board (68030@33 Mhz + 68882). Quick memory map:

68230 PIT $FF800C00
68561 MPCC $FF800000
62421 RTC $FF800A00
68230 PIT2 $FF800200
32KB 0ws SRAM $FF04xxxx..$FF07xxxx
256KB EPROM $FF00xxxx..$FF03xxxx

CP31 manual says that ROM is initially mapped at 0, and the mapping is reset by writing anything to this address.

Last edited by shattered; 06/11/12 07:56 PM.
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Be careful with that link... Firefox prevented the site from installing software on my computer... and I wasn't able to download any roms.

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I was able to get the roms, but it was a bit tough.

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I'll use another file host then. Is zx.pk.ru OK?

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could you use goput.it

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