22 Apr
2016
22 Apr
'16
4:17 p.m.
Someone mentioned there is a battery. It could be held by that, or a
module
from ST Microelectronics or Dallas Semiconductor. The
latter two tend to
be
plastic packages that are ~28 pins or so and taller
than normal chips. The
Dallas and ST modules have RAM/real time clock and a battery in one
package.
In the case of some arcade games (Silent Scope from Konami is a big one),
once the NVRAM looses it's contents the machine wont load past it in the
bootup process. On the Sun Workstations when the modules go bad it will
boot but but the MAC address is blank. It's possible to reprogram the
contents back on the Sun workstations.
If the case of the AlphaStation is that it can't get past post without the
contents of the NVRAM, and the NVRAM is in a Dallas or STM module then
the easy solution is to get a dump of a working system, perhaps hex edit
the
contents to correct the MAC address, then plug it in
(hopefully socketed.)
If the NVRam is held by a CR3202 battery and a SMD SRAM chip or
something, there would have to be a way around it being blank I'd imagine.
In my case there is just a CR2032, and no Dallas module. I will try
replacing the CR2032 again.
Regards
Rob