The best part about retro computing is the idea that you’ll save some poor system from being scrapped and revive it to a working state, at which point you can bask in the glory of a job well done. That’s when reality often strikes hard, and you find yourself troubleshooting a maddening list of issues as you question everything about your life choices. Such was the case with [This Does Not Compute] over at YouTube with a Sun SPARCstation IPX that decided to put up a big fight.
This is the second video of a series. In the first installment, the PSU was repaired, and a boot failure was diagnosed. The system’s onboard diagnostic led to the assumption that one of the 8 kB SRAM ICs was defective. You can readily get SRAM replacements, so it seemed to be an easy fix. Unfortunately, the fun was only beginning as the system reported the exact same error after the SRAM was replaced.
After flipping a virtual table, the mainboard was swapped with a donor one from a scrapped laptop system. With this, it booted, but the video output showed only vertical lines. Obviously, the solution here was to insert a replacement video card, which not only fixed the display output but also demonstrates once again that you can fix many vintage computing issues by simply replacing hardware.
