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Amiga computer related discussion => Amiga Hardware Issues and discussion => Topic started by: cbcvenice on October 05, 2005, 04:33:27 AM
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Old time Amiga User here (started on A1000 in'88)
I Brought my A3000 out to test it and see if I want to sell, but decided I will keep (i think) and even upgrade...
USA Amiga user.
What are best upgrades in your opinion for this system?
Amiga 3000 16mhz, 8meg Ram(2chip 6fast), 40megHD, 2ndExternal Floppy, 2.04 Rom and 37.xx workbench.
I want to go through many of my disks and put on a hard drive and organize stuff....mostly music, anims, documents and games(of course).
Here are a few issues as well:
1.Keyboard for a3000 - dont think it is easy fix(Return key doen't respond), so where to get use/keyboard? or should I get converter?
2.battery for A3000 - soldered two things in my life, but not anything as fragile as a motherboard... I might be up to "gambling" on doing myself -so, what might be my best option with battery?
3.Bigger hard drive - current is 40meg, would love to find bigger one. where best to look?
Oh, o.k. I'll go for 2 more questions... Please don't hurt me!! please!?
4. Kickstart 2.04 current... I think I desperately need to upgrade! Which is best for A3000 16/40 2megChip 6meg fast.
5. Lastly, best way to get latest software onto A3000?... I do not have cdrom or ethernet card
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1) Sounds like it might just be a question of cleaning it, which is pritty easy.
2) It's not that hard... sugest you solder 2 whires to it though and have the battery sepperat. a Cointype battery is the best option in my oppinion.
3) Secondhand computer market... SCSI drives drop every now and then. Get a 4GB one.
4) Only one ledft to upgrade with and thats 3.1. But you should uppgrade the CPU aswell... a 060 would be fine. :)
5) Get hold of an external SCSI CDRom. There's also software to connect up the Amiga to a PC through the Par port but that's SLOW.
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2) It's not that hard... sugest you solder 2 whires to it though and have the battery sepperat. a Cointype battery is the best option in my oppinion.
Uhm, dont do any soldering directly on lithium coin batteries... they are rumored to explode when getting to hot.
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skabby wrote:
2) It's not that hard... sugest you solder 2 whires to it though and have the battery sepperat. a Cointype battery is the best option in my oppinion.
Uhm, dont do any soldering directly on lithium coin batteries... they are rumored to explode when getting to hot.
You need to go to Radio Shack and buy a lithium coin battery holder, a lithium 3.0V 2032? coin battery, and a diode to prevent charging the lithium battery on the positive (+) terminal. Download the file on aminet called lithbatt.lha or something like that. There is a list of the parts and a nice diagram. You should never solder directly to the lithium coin battery itself.
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Of cause you should use a holder for the coin battery. :roll:
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Sadly you cannot go to Radio Shack and buy the Coin cell holder anymore! I tried to no avail several times and it is a discontinued item. I ended up going to a scrap PC junkyard and buying a old PC Mobo for $1 to get the darn holder! Cheaper than online.
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Let's really look at the facts, and stop throwing useless items at this person.
All A3000's had a 68030 processor and a floating point unit soldered to its motherboard. The A3000-16 uses 68030 and 68881 @ 16 MHz while the A3000-25 uses 68030 and 68882 @ 25 MHz.
(1) At best case, it has a Buster04,DMAC02,and Ramsey04. Your talking about NO possibility of 060 without the upgrade chips, and a cost factor of =/- $130 USD.
(2)Has flawed on-board SCSI controller chip: =/- $30 USD
There are several problems that can occur when adding additional SCSI devices to the SCSI bus on the A3000. Most common are random SCSI bus lockups, especially with CD-ROMS or tape drives, and random checksum errors when copying large files between devices. These problems can, in most cases, be attributed to the WD33C93A SCSI controller chip in the A3000. Most, if not all, A3000's shipped with the WD33C93A-PL 00-04 chip revision. This chip had known bugs when multiple devices were present on the SCSI bus. With a single device, problems rarely occurred. As soon as the user started to add devices to the bus, the problems mentioned above would start to appear. The WD33C93A-PL 00-08 chip revision addresses and fixes the above problems.
(3)AmigaDOS2.04-3.1 can use drives less than 4.0 GIGS only, and sometimes, only 2 gigs is ideal. (See below).
It is not too difficult to understand what causes the 4+ GB problems, though perhaps a little bit technical. Simply put, AmigaDOS uses 32-bit pointers to reference positions on a hard disk and therefore can reference a maximum of 2^32 bytes or 4,294,967,296 (4 GB) - Note that, with some older SCSI controllers and devices the limitation is actually 2 Gigabytes.
So, for a 2.04 system, I would recommend a 2 gig drive.
(4)Forget the soldering of the battery. Just nip and cut the battery off. Leave the "ears" that stand upright. Solder new leads to these 2 ears, and lead them back to a new location.
Personally, I put a replacement battery in a small plastic bottle, and tied it off away from the motherboard.
So, if your going to be helpful, tell this user the facts. Don't throw "do this and do that" until he can resolve the basic problems with this 16Mhz machine. And, yes I do know that most revisions of the 25Mhz board shipped with these old chips installed. I am not trying to rain on your desire, but start with want will stablize your system.
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Hey, thanks so much for all the input!
1.I will be trying the keyboard fix mentioned in another forum ....
http://www.qdev.de/?location=electronics/keyboardrepair
2. battery is already removed -- along with posts(ears), so I will have to solder some, I may try the lithium coin convert or run wires to battery in safe location. Any harm in running a3000 without any battery?
3. found a site that has some used scsi HD drives, but will watch prices for just a little. 2gig will most likely be enough (sure, that is what I said when I got 40meg HD!)
;-)
4. Haven't looked real hard, but not having luck finding scsi cdrom drives...
5. Question on 3.1 roms... there are four (4) rom "sockets" two (2) which are taken by 2.04. Do I just add 3.1 in the open sockets or do I need to remove the 2.04.... guess I could read info that comes with chips, but hey...since your here... :-)
Thanks again!
Keep Smilin'
Lar
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No harm in running the machine without battery and yes you'll have to remove the existing ROM chips to make room for the new ones.
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Details of chips on board.
Board is A3000 B2 313312 Re 9/03
Yes, 68030fe16b and 68881fn16b are soldered on board.
Super buster (fatbuster) is 390539-07 71 4319 5101 3G
Super DMAC 81 390537 4790 - 02
Ramsey 390541-04 R
scsi controller chip - WD 33C93A-PL 911B WDC PROTO
System works fine without battery
It does have A3000 daughterboard Rev. 7 (what would be the best investment to get to plug into daughterboard? - if any?)
HD boots up to decent workbench screen (need to change the wallpaper though) and shows WB as 37.175 and kickstart 37.71 the disks that are with the manual say wb 2.05.. whatever.
I have a few programs loaded on HD, like old version of Prowrite, diskmaster, modplayers and a few music mods, graphic viewers and couple of shareware games...
screen mode is ntsc high res interlaced 660x442 16 color on a 19 inch viewsonic...
I do have crossdos to transfer from amiga to pc - what would
be some choice programs to put on this miggy? Hey, right now I see some Flying toasters floating around the screen....guess I will have to see what screensaver I have loaded....Thanks.
Lar
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Well, I got it within 97% on the internal chips.
To use a CD-ROM (CD-R) drive:
(1)The -04 and Proto are bothersome and have faults.Upgrade the SCSI controller chip to the -08 version to use the external SCSI motherboard port. Or, you could buy any model of these SCSI Zorro II card's (A2091, Trumpcard, GVP SCSI Series II, DataFlyer SCSI, or SCSI III like a Fastlane Z3.
(2)There are several software packages for CD-R, among the best is AsimWareCDFS. Hard to find, but worth it.
I'll send you a private hint on SCSI hard drives.
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The SCSI on the Fastlane ZIII is hit or miss on the A3000. The RAM will work with no problems. He'd be better off with one of the other options.
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Hi,
any ideas where to get the WD33c93a rev 8 chip?
Saludos
Rod
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I picked mine up from Softhut.com
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I suggest not worrying about the onboard SCSI controller chip and getting an accellerator like a WarpEngine or other that has SCSI-II included. It will be faster with the new CPU and have faster memory access to the RAM on the accellerator card. I have two A3000's with WarpEngine 3040's installed that were a great step forward from the stock 25mHz 030's, so it would be even more noticable on his 16mHz machine.
:-)
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Amiga4k you dont know what the heck your talking about! I am sick to death of people stating the stock chips in an A3000 wont work with things.
I used my A3000 just up to 2003 with the only upgrade chip being the buster. I put in the 11 just for the heck of it and didnt ever have a problem before I upgraded it.
I used SEVERAL SCSI drives with my stock WD SCSI chip, never had a rev 8 in it
I used a CSPPC AND a Cyberstorm MK II and MK III in it for YEARS with no problems.
At the end it was in a Mirage tower with a Mediator PCI board, several PCI cards like a SB128, ethernet, Voodoo 3 video, TV and a Spider USB card. All with only the buster switched out. I also tried it with the stock buster just to see and it still worked fine.
My boot drive was a 4GB IBM SCSI drive on the stock SCSI, I had a catweasel ZII card with some IDE drives on it and a DVD burner on it. Again never had a problem.
So your system with 3.1 roms is fine and you can put just about anything in it. Look at my pictures here on Amiga.org to see my old system up close.
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>Uhm, dont do any soldering directly on lithium coin
>batteries... they are rumored to explode when getting to hot.
I can testify that they don't like heat guns. And the stuff inside doesn't taste very good.
Battery holders are great. I ended up doing mine with a cordless phone battery last time around, sortof biggish bit us wrapped in plastic, rechargable, and I used some wire to move it away from the motherboard.
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@Amiga4k
I agree with Acill here.
My A3000 DMAC Rev 2/Ramsey Rev 4 worked fine with a Cyberstorm Mk2 060.
For the onboard SCSI, I ran a CD-ROM, 7 CD Changer, tape drive, Zip and Jaz drives, and plenty of HDs with the original WD proto chip with no problems. I eventually swapped it out with an AMD chip late in it's life.
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billt wrote:
And the stuff inside doesn't taste very good.
Err??! :-)
What happened that caused you to taste the insides of a battery, or shouldn't I ask?! :-D
- Ali
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As an owner of 2 A3000's.. a 16mhz and a 25mhz,
my advice is (unless you have extra-ordinary good
luck and lots of money).
First don't worry about the origonal chips, they
all work fine.(I've owned my A3k-25 since new and
never found the need to upgrade any chips, (SCSI etc.))
I do have a WarpEngine in the A3k-25 (runs great)
In the A3k-16 I installed an A3640 accelerator (much
easier to find than a WarpEngine) and 16 megs fast ram.
As for a harddrive I've found the Quantum drives very
Amiga friendly (the easiest to setup). I'd go for a 3.2
gig 50 pin drive. I'd also get a set of 3.1 roms then you
can run OS 3.9 (although OS 3.1 is nice)
And if you are lucky enough to find one, a CyberVision
64 GFX card is is a great addition.
Oh, and as far as the coin battery is concerned ... the
3 volt coin battery probably only works in less than half
of the Amigas its tried in (I'll probably get an arguement
here ;-) ) Also I've been using my A3k-25 for the last 3
or so years without a battery with no ill efects.
Other than that.. I'd say use the machine for awhile..
before deciding what else you want to do.
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I know it would be better to have an external scsi port, but until now i still couldn't buy a Warpengine or MKIII. I cannot find one to buy!!
Any ideas? I really hate the 16 mb ram.. crap..
SAludos
Rod