Get the latest tech news
An AlphaStation's SROM
JP's Website An AlphaStation's SROM Posted on 2025-03-30 Contents - Background - The AlphaStation 500 - SROM - SROM Image selection - Splitting the SROM - Decoding the images - Dissasmbling the decoded images - Conclusions - Links Background I have a thing for weird 90's RISC workstations running UNIX. So when Rob said "Hey, I have an AlphaStation in the boot of my car ..." obviously it came home with me.
There is a serial ROM (SROM) on the main board, and after reset, some logic internal to the CPU kicks in to generate a clock pulse. The code is just enough to get the processor to configure its external memory bus, and find a memory-mapped parallel ROM, which it will then hand-over execution to. This tool takes some Alpha machine code, and adds all the tag and parity information, giving you an SROM image you can load serially into the chip on start-up.
Or read this on Hacker News