🚀 go-pugleaf

Does anybody have experience upgrading a 3/180 to the equivalent of a
4/390?  (I say "equivalent" because the price list seems to call the
result a 4/380.) In particular, I'm wondering about support for 1/2" tape
drives and disk controllers. It seems obvious that it won't support our
old TapeMaster controller. However, the little information available in
the price list says that it doesn't support the Xylogics 472 controller as
a boot device. Is this true? Seems harsh since this is not an "obsolete"
device, like the TapeMaster. What sort of SCSI tapes can we hook up? 8mm
Exabyte and 1/4" streaming, I assume. What's the caveat about not mixing
embedded and non- embedded SCSI? Does this have to do with using the
on-board SCSI controller along with another controller on a separate VME
card?

Also, anybody with experience using Ciprico Rimfire controllers in such a
configuration? How about in a standard 4/390? I'm a little nervous in
about this, not wanting (or being able to) pull out the oscilloscope to
debug any problems. 

Finally, we'd like to use more than 8MB of memory, but refuse to pay Sun's
prices. I think I've read that one can replace the 1MB SIMMs on the CPU
board with 4MB SIMMs. Anybody had problems with this?

Thanks for any info you can supply. I'll summarize and post any
interesting responses.

Michael Wagner
Siemens Corporate Research, Inc.
Princeton, NJ 08540
wagner@cadillac.siemens.com