OK, I purchased another just to see if there was an issue with my board, and it also gives no video signal. I tried with the sd card it came with(I didn't put anything on it and assumed there was a stock flash, but I'll inspect further), and also the eMMC flashed with openmediavault named "stretch-openmediavault-rockpro64-0.8.3-1141-arm64.img" . Is there some quickstart guide for these for just getting the hardware to boot with a vanilla nix from the store?
What OS are you using?
With NetBSD the display works. In the highest resolution only the left two thirds of the display work, but it works.
With DietPi I can not get it to work.
There is nothing at all on a new SD card purchased from the Pine store.
Do not do anything with the SPI ROM until you get everything working.
The NetBSD image from armbsd.org works. The DietPi image from the DietPi website works. There are others that work; but I cannot say which because I haven't tried them. To make your own bootable image you need the idbloader, U-Boot, and an operating system partition. They have to be flashed at exact locations on the card.
:wq
Nearly all images will have the uboot package (2 or 3 files) in the 1st 16 M (of the image)
armbian is a good test image, ALLWAYS be sure to get a rockPRO image, NOT rock image
If you can get a serial connection, this is the best troubleshooting method
I am using devuan, don't remember if it was a conversion (likely)