The Tadpole SPARCbook 6500
I bought a SPARC laptop at a garage sale.
The machine is a Tadpole SPARCbook 6500 with an UltraSPARC-IIe at 650 MHz, 4GB of RAM, and a 1400x1050 panel. Tadpole built these in Carlsbad after merging with RDI, and they are the last generation of a genuinely strange idea: a laptop that runs Solaris on real SPARC silicon.
It powers on. It also greets you with this:
The IDPROM contents are invalid
Dead NVRAM battery. The IDPROM is sixteen bytes: a format byte, a machine type, six bytes of MAC address, a host ID, and an XOR checksum. When the battery goes, it all reads back as zeros. Ethernet address 0:0:0:0:0:0. Host ID 00000040.
OpenBSD does not care
OpenBSD/sparc64 7.9 boots on it fine. Invalid IDPROM, dead clock, zero MACs, doesn't matter it comes up, attaches everything, and hands you a shell.
Which turns out to be interesting, because the Tadpole SPARCbook 5000/6500 is currently sitting on the OpenBSD sparc64 page under Untested machines (please help us test!). Nobody in twenty years has bothered to check.
So I checked. Almost everything works: both CardBus slots, both PCMCIA, USB, the DVD-ROM, all 4GB, and the internal keyboard — which is notable, because the SPARCbook keyboard is a known problem under stock Solaris and needs Tadpole's own driver disc.
What doesn't work: no audio, no power management (the tadpmu node OpenBoot probes goes nowhere), and the TOD clock fails to attach with clock1: can't map register.
The discs matter more than the laptop
The seller threw in a binder. Solaris 8, 9, and 10 media, a stack of Sun Educational Services course guides, and the actual treasure: three Tadpole discs: the All SPARCbooks Support Software CD, a SPARCbook-specific StarOffice 7.0, and the SPARCbook 5000 User's Guide.
Good news: someone already saved it. There's an archive.org item, tadpole_viper_sparcle_drivers, pulled off flextronicssupport.com before that site went down: 7 GB of manuals, firmware, and every install ISO. If you have one of these machines, that's where to go.
Better news: my support discs are different revisions than the ones in that archive. So they're getting imaged and uploaded.
Next
Clone the original disk before touching anything. Image the discs. Get OpenBSD onto an SSD and send a proper dmesg. Figure out how to remove the keyboard so I can replace the NVRAM.
The clock is wrong and will stay wrong until then. I keep setting it by hand. It doesn't mind.
If you know anything about these, send me an email. I want to know sparcbook@mail.256qam.com