It all started in 2020 (I think) when I visited my friends in Fort Collins, Colorado and came home with a stack of Sun machines. Most of these were in good condition aside from all having dead NVRAM chips (a very common and easily solved issue with these machines). However, the SPARCstation 1 was different from all the others: anything that could be removed from the main board had been taken. All I had was the main board, power supply, and floppy drive. They didn't even leave me any SCSI cables!
After getting a couple of the other Sun machines working, I decided I knew enough of what I was doing to give the SS1 a crack. I figured out that it takes standard 30-pin SIMMs for its memory and ordered the maximum 64MB it would accept, I ordered a brand new production NVRAM chip from an electronics supplier, and I also got some PROM chips to make a new boot ROM.
Thanks to Tefad on Freenode IRC (I'm pretty sure this all predates libera.chat) I got my hands on a ROM dump of OpenBoot 2.9 for the SS1. I flashed it to one of my PROMs and fired it up. When at first I did not see a video signal, I was not worried. When the NVRAM has not been programmed on these machines, it very commonly can take several minutes for it to get past some initial panicking and get to the part where the video signal comes on and it's ready to accept your commands to get things sorted. However, such a fate was never to come.
I broke out my Pentium III Sony Vaio and used QModem to monitor the serial line on the rear of the SS1. Somehow I guessed that 9600 baud 8N1 was the correct configuration for the serial terminal, and to my delight and dismay, I saw an error message right after powering up which informed me that my memory was not properly installed.
Wikipedia had misinformed me about the correct positions for the first memory bank. I updated the article to have the correct info for the next poor sucker who tries this. With that problem solved, I set up the NVRAM as the prophecy foretold, and I attempted to boot SunOS 3 from floppy.
"Illegal Instruction" may haunt my nightmares for years to come, but I didn't know it yet. I removed, disassembled, cleaned, and lubricated the floppy drive in a desperate hope that it had just misread the disk, but alas, it refused to work. No matter! I'll just hook up the CD-ROM drive from a different Sun machine to one of the internal SCSI ports and do that! This time, I would try NetBSD 9 which I happened to already have a disc for, and still I would see "Illegal Instruction". With that, I had no other options to consider at the time, and I gave up.
In 2024 I decided to give it another go, having forgotten exactly what was going wrong in the boot sequence. However, the only different result I could get was "bad magic number" when attempting to boot SunOS 4.1.4 from CD-ROM. This only puzzled me further, though. I even bothered going through the steps to turn my Sun Ultra 2 into a netboot server to try and boot NetBSD that way. Well, my server configuration was just fine. As I ran "boot net" I could see it counting the bytes as the boot program came across the ethernet line, but after it got the last one, "Illegal Instruction" returned.
For now, this is where the SS1 story stands. I have a few desperate ideas of what to do next:
This last option seems the most promising to me, given the "bad magic number" anomaly with SunOS 4. OpenBoot 2.9 is known to only work with SunOS 4.1.1 or later, so my suspicion is that in addition to working for older versions of SunOS, an older OpenBoot may also work with other OSes like NetBSD. However, a ROM dump of OpenBoot 1.x is proving impossible for me to find. Even eBay listings of SPARCstation 1s are often missing the boot ROM which is very suspicious to me. Who is stealing these ROM chips, and what are they using them for?
The NVRAM replacement is also a serious contender since it is known that the new production versions of that chip are not exactly the same as the old ones, despite bearing an identical part number. It's weird to me that that would cause the exact behavior I'm seeing, though.
I hope to update this page before long with better news.
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