QNX on the Commodore 900 – Raiders of the lost hard drive [video]

In 1984 Commodore introduced the C900, a budget Unix workstation with an obscure Zilog Z8000 processor. Unfortunately, when hey bought the Amiga, the Commodore 900 project was canceled and today only a few dozen prototypes exist. A few years ago I happened to get one of these prototypes. Without a working power supply, monitor, keyboard and with the hard drive giving a mysterious 0xFF error, I was left puzzling on how to make the machine run. This talk documents my successful effort to bring the machine back to life. It is a continent-spanning tale of digital archaeology, which included, among others, disassembling the Z8000 BIOS, reverse-engineering the keyboard interface and figuring out the hard disk low level format. After I figured out how to make the machine run, I have helped two other Commodore 900 owners with the same problems to make their machines fully working.

This excerpt is published under fair use for community discussion. Read the full article at Fosdem.