Still a little bit besides the exact group focus - but as I've seen MFX3+
mentioned before, and it's a close relative of the CMI, I'm posting my findings
just for reference and for the benefit of others who might like to use both
machines together. Hope this is ok.
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Re. the necessity of a Dongle/Key:
I found in the service manual that the "dongle" might be in a GAL onboard, could be switched on and off, and could use the built in ROM test to test it and find it probably works. This is how to do that:
Flip DIP switch 8 on the WSEXEC board over, hardware reset, watch the numbers displayed on the card, when it shows xx10 then toggle DIP switch 1, when it shows xx20 (and probably progresses to xx30 thereafter), the "dongle" test has passed. Flip DIP switch 1 whenever you want to go to the next test.
Besides, test 5 resulted in xx5F confirming the DS1643 real time clock chip built in battery is dead. Test 7 (loading programmable hardware) took so long that I didn't wait for its completion, maybe because I had removed the HDU, maybe for other reasons.
Setting DIP switch 8 off, and doing another hardware reset, brings the system back to normal bootup operation.
Moreover, the normal ROM test page (colourfully framed equipment list on startup) shows a machine ID number. Maybe that already confirms the "Dongle" (in the GAL) is there, and an external one is not needed. I assume that because the same machine ID is displayed later on with a line indicating the original owner and more lines showing the (probably) licensed = activated functionality.
So most probably, my earlier error message resulted from an incomplete manual boot process that had not switched on the built in Dongle functionality.
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Re. NVRAM and network configuration / missing BLUE key functionality:
I selected manual NVRAM configuration with B0 (use TS drive 0 for booting), disabling the display of the MFX3 image on startup, to monitor what's going on instead. I also added a reasonable IP, machine name and network in the respective config file that appears after NVRAM reset/config or when you press a key to "Edit machine configuration".
That configuration file includes instruction to quit with BLUE-Q or save with BLUE-Z.
Neither of these works, so you would be stuck, as already mentioned here:
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/Fairlight-CMI/conversations/topics/5238
I found that the ESC key does what BLUE should do (at least when I use the MFX2 keyboard, and technically, it should probably be the same as the MFX3 keyboard).
So you actually can press ESC, that makes the menu in the status line appear, and thereafter you can e.g. press Q to quit without saving or Z to save and exit.
I also observed that after uploading the MFX 15.6.0.2 software into the MFX keyboard, and while the MFX3+ was attached and running, the normal diagnostics etc. started by BLUE-1-2-3 etc. can't be started - haven't followed that up any further yet, but the same diagnostics work as expected in the original MFX3 keyboard when it's not connected to anything.
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Re. various prompts, logging in, changing the machine personality:
After the steps described above - and maybe including the beshell, befame, bemfx... commands I tried somewhere down the road - later boots went further with machine ID etc. displayed, and without any complaint about missing dongle/key.
When - after a beshell command - the machine boots only into a $ prompt, it is probably reasonable to type:
$ login
and use
mfx
as user name.
That produces some OS9 welcome messages and makes the # prompt appear, and only thereafter do commands like bemfx etc. work.
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Re. current status:
Now, the boot process continues quite far. At the moment, it complains about missing ESPPCI RAM (actually, not only the RAM but the whole card is absent...). And may have some problem with DCC card number 0, as shown by dccdiag.
So far for now - I hope I can get further... :-)
I haven't seen this information in a sufficient form anywhere else, so I hope it's ok for all of you if I just put it here. Thanks for your bandwith (you see I am that old...), and
Kind regards!
Joerg