[rescue] SPARCstation 1 boot woes

[David McMackins II]

>   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.

-- 
Regards,

David E. McMackins II
www.mcmackins.org