18 Feb
2026
18 Feb
'26
11:03 p.m.
Yeah, sure, but why?
The Sun386i can come up with a dead timekeeper memory, but you then need
to put in the appropriate values in the boot loader if I recall.
I just refreshed two out of the three 386i's I have; both have 2 aaa
battery holders soldered into the timekeeper chips um.... 30 years ago I
guess and both were working fine last year with new batteries, a reboot
and a kick in the pants in BIOS. Two of the power supplies were dead;
both in the 12 volt "snooper" circuits from the 120/240 volt input. I
just backwired in a 100-300v to 12v supply and everything works all nice
and happy.
It's a nice machine, and both my CG3 and CG5 (yep, the roadrunner) still
work. Didn't get to trying the SunVGA board but it did boot and
everything was there from the 1990's days when I ran them as
CrystelCom's main internet router and DNS/SMTP servers.
If anyone's figured out how to get a Cyrix accelerator CPU running I'm
all attention.
C
On 2/18/26 15:18, Miod Vallat via cctalk wrote:
did anyone
ever create an image of the Sun 386i firmware (EP)ROM?
I'll try to dump it this
weekend. Do not hesitate to poke me early next
week if you don't hear back.
So if someone has a 386i for sale (ideally in
Europe, I'm in Germany) I'm also interested...
There's a guy near
Paris, who used to maintain a bunch of 386i for a
large company, until they were eventually replaced, not that many years
ago (they were used with in-house ISA boards, and the company wanted to
use an Unix-like operating system on the machines driving these boards,
at a time where neither Linux nor Solaris on Intel were a thing). To the
best of my knowledge he still has four of them:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/186791746118
Miod