August 11, 2025

Sun 3 bootrom souce - First hookup with 3/160 and promice

First I tried my 3/160 board untouched, with the actual ROM chip in place and verified that it worked, and that I had my serial cables right.

As things are now, the bootrom talks to serial port A at 9600 baud.

Now we pry the 27C512 out of its socket and plug in the Promice cable. This uses the 28 pin ribbon cable and I plug it into the lower "socket" on the Promice, labeled D0-D7 (my promice is a dual unit and also has a cable "socket" marked D8-D15).

I only have two jumpers installed on the Promice. I have "ext" and "28". Actually I have 4 jumpers, because I have the exact same two jumpers on the upper board that I am not using.

With the sun3 powered off, I do this:

loadice -i sun3160.bin
This takes nearly 30 seconds at 19200 baud. When it finishes, I power up the Sun3 and I see normal activity on the DIAG leds and the expected messages from the serial port.

It works!! With the switch in the DIAG position I see the following messages, and when it finishes, DIAG led 6 is blinking at about 1 Hz.

Boot PROM Selftest

PROM Checksum Test
DVMA Reg Test
Context Reg Test
Segment Map Wr/Rd Test
Segment Map Address Test
Page Map Test
Memory Path Data Test
NXM Bus Error Test
Interrupt Test
TOD Clock Interrupt Test
MMU Access Bit Test
MMU Access/Modify Bit Test
MMU Invalid Page Test
MMU Protected Page Test
Parity Test
Memory Size = 0x00000004 Megabytes
Memory Test (Testing 0x00000004 MBytes)   Testing...

Selftest passed.

Type a character within 10 seconds to enter Menu Tests...
                                                          (e for echo mode) EEPROM: Using RS232 A port.
Selftest Completed.

Sun Workstation, Model Sun-3/160M.
ROM Rev 3.0, 4MB memory installed, Serial #17403.
Ethernet address 8:0:20:1:DB:0, Host ID 110043FB.


Type a character within 10 seconds to enter Menu Tests...

Diagnostic Auto-boot in progress...
Invalid device = ''
>
Now we can move on to testing the bootrom software that we have compiled.
Feedback? Questions? Drop me a line!

Tom's Computer Info / tom@mmto.org