A DEC Alpha should load SROM and then jump straight into SRM (firmware - BIOS essentially) or ARC (Windows NT firmware).

Any VGA capable PCI video card should work in an Alpha well enough to get into SRM, even if the RAM and/or SCSI controller are dead.

He said the Matrox video card did not work in other systems. But how about other video cards in his Alpha?

This is an amazing write-up but I want to know if he really needs to get into mini-console or if he just needs a working video card to get into SRM.

Perhaps there is something of use in here… (it describes working with the mini-console for example) https://manx-docs.org/collections/antonio/dec/MDS-2000-01/cd...

I likewise wrote a COVID-boredom-induced blog post about my many missteps, and eventual failure, getting AIX to run on an old PC. My "learnings" there were that the installation media (floppies) are _written to_ by the installer, making a reset to a known state rather difficult, and also that support for IDE disks was only made available in a patch.

Or it could be platform quirks, or more interesting failures like crystal oscillator degrading, but I'd leave those to later.

Not to say SRAM is any better (it means "I shit").