Excellent write up, so detailed! Thanks for posting it.
I wonder if AXPbox would compile on Pi? Will try it just to witness the history in progress, ES40 with numerous fans and whirrrs of the SCSI drives ... silently blinking on a Pi board.
That was originally my idea - that's why I need an open source Alpha emulator. I don't have my Pi set up right now, but considering es40 builds on RPi AXPbox should, too, at least on a 64-bit OS.
I used Ubuntu on a Raspberry Pi 4 for the es40 testing. It's however quite possible that AXPbox will run on 32-bit Raspbian - I had problems with a PowerPC G4 (Freescale MPC7447A) CPU, but that is in addition to being 32-bit also big endian.
Tried following this guide, and ended up with I/O failure during the installation. Replacing the emulated IDE controller with a SCSI one solved the problem. I got some non-fatal errors during installation, but the OS installed successfully and I've not run into any problems once the installation finished.
The SCSI controller is less stable (more buggy) than the IDE controller, but glad it works for you! The non fatal errors are okay as well, now time for you to setup a cluster!
I wonder if AXPbox would compile on Pi? Will try it just to witness the history in progress, ES40 with numerous fans and whirrrs of the SCSI drives ... silently blinking on a Pi board.