What I really wish about this article is that the author would say if they tried any other video card in this system.

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...