[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[David McMackins II]

Update: the flicker of video signal got me thinking that maybe there
was some sort of issue initializing the video card, so I tried removing
it. This granted some progress: the 1.0 ROM now prints the machine info
header over the serial line (which it was not doing before). However,
after a couple of seconds, I see "Testi" before the system becomes
unresponsive.

I thought this might be a RAM issue, so I tried swapping out some SIMMs
to no avail. For science I also tried reinstalling the 2.9 ROM in case
that too was having issues with the video card, but it behaved the same
as before.

-- 
Regards,

David E. McMackins II
www.mcmackins.org

On Thu, 2025-05-29 at 19:02 -0500, David McMackins II via rescue wrote:
> >   It's definitely v1.0.  I set up MAME to emulate a 4/60 with the
> > above-mentioned ROM, it came up fine, and the banner said 1.0.  I
> > think you're probably ok to try this with your last chip.
> 
> So a little while ago I got out my ROM programmer (whose box in which
> I
> also store my PROMs) and noticed that I in fact had two! So I went
> ahead and programmed one with that image I found. Unfortunately, this
> did not turn out as I'd hoped.
> 
> Despite having already programmed the NVRAM, I saw a message on the
> serial line that the checksum was bad and that it was resetting to
> default values, after which it never seemed to do anything else. I
> then
> decided to try removing the battery to erase it and try again. The
> same
> thing happened, but this time I got a message about starting the RTC
> as
> well.
> 
> At this point, upon powering up the machine, nothing seems to happen
> and I get no messages on the serial line. Occasionally, I will see
> the
> connected monitor display a message that it's going into power-saving
> mode, which indicates that it got just a flicker of signal. I did
> also
> try disconnecting the keyboard in case there were messages it was
> trying to display on screen. I should point out that on the 2.9 ROM,
> I
> was getting a picture on the screen and able to interact from the
> keyboard.
> 
> I suppose it's possible that after those initial messages, it's still
> outputting over serial but at a different data rate for some reason,
> but that seems unlikely to me. This is beginning to seem more like a
> hardware issue after all.