Interesting - did you youse some modern technology for
doing that? I already thought to attach a logic analyzer to the
NVRAM to see which bytes are read first (e.g. for dtermining
the hardware configuration).
Late to the convo, but it's interesting.
You might be able to dump the ROMs and find someone who knows Sparc
assembly to run it through a debugger/emulator and trace it? Hard part
would probably be knowing where the NVRAM lives in memory space (memory
map.)
Maybe the MAME people would have an idea? Some of the old arcade games
suffer from the exact same issue - they store variables in the ST
Microelectronics Timekeepers and once it dies game won't boot due to a
byte or two.
MAME has SPARC emulation.
Other thing is people with a working Tadpoles needs to dump their NVRAMS
ASAP because it sounds like all of them are about to quit working?
--
: Ethan O'Toole
