Just got myself an A3000... need some help! :D

[darksun9210]

Hi all,
just got myself an A3000 after lusting after one for all these years.
she's a little battle damaged, but nothing a little squeeze with the right tools :hammer: , and a quick rub down won't fix.
it's a rev9 mainboard with a rev 7 daughter board.
now. problems.
learnt that she won't boot without the expansion board. just get what looks like chipram error green screen.

keyboard doesn't really work. no caps lock light, and open up a shell window and just get " ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' " as though a key is stuck. even disconnecting the keyboard and it still persists in the " ''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''''' " is this a CIA problem? - scratch that, keyboard doesn't seem to be playing ball at all! XD

there are no terminator blocks in the sip sockets, yet she boots just fine with one 52Mb scsi drive, and no external devices. leave as is? is this right? going to swap out with an acard scsi/ide bridge and IDE CF adapter.

ram. got 8 zip chips in the fast ram sockets, so should see 4MB from what i figure, but can only see just under a meg at workbench. any ideas? nothing really launches at startup, as she's got workbench 2.0 installed, and when booted more than 2000000bytes chip ram is available. i've moved the zips around to see if anything changes, but no difference - update, think i figured it. i think they are 256kx4 chips, so i do only have 1 meg of fast. kind of a good thing - shows that all the sockets are working

the battery's been removed, but there is a little bit of corrosion on the mainboard. what do i do to clean it up?

other than that, ordering myself some 3.1 roms, and some more zips.

many thanks for any help

[darksun9210]

ah cool, ok, so CIA's are linked to keyboard control. good. i wasn't sure. i'll give them a swap and see what happens.

that's good info regarding the memory, vesalia website seems to show that they have some km51440az zips in stock in packs of 4. ordered 8 packs, and an indivisionECS, and 3.1roms, but haven't recieved an order confirmation email yet....

aaanyway, lets swap those CIAs

thought. if i put a 5pin din to ps2 adapter on the A3000, can i use an A4000 keyboard just to rule out what works and what doesn't?

---update---
swapped the CIA's nothing's changed. managed to break a leg on pin 9 by being a little bit ham fisted. :grr: but wedged a piece of wire in there to make the connection. still no life from the keyboard... :/

[darksun9210]

cool, i'll see if i can find a keyboard adapter. sure i have one somewhere...

sorry, yes, i did mean the daughter board, and yes i do get a yellow flashy screen without it ok good, so that's normal. right. learning lots today.

ok, battery damage. taken a photo of it, and it looks much worse properly lit with a camera flash than under the energy saving bulb in the bedroom

i've tickled it with some vinager, and some cotton buds, is that going to be enought to stop it?

Mechy, thanks for the zips offer, i'll give you a shout if i get stuck otherwise

---update---

tried a 5pin to ps2 keyboard adapter. brand new adapter, the bag not even been opened. plugged it, plus a known good A4k keyboard into the 3000. she wouldn't boot.
so unplugged, let the machine boot to workbench, then plugged in the adapter and keyboard. screen went grey and no drive activity. unplugged and she rebooted.

upshot is, i've found a way to reboot without switching off and back on again... and we now know it's something on the mainboard that's not happy.

[darksun9210]

ok, after double, and triple checking which pin supplies 5v, i got out my trusty multimeter... wait, no i didn't - i couldn't find it, so stripped the wires on a tiny PC fan and stuck the ends in the keyboard port holes and switched 'er on!

no movement. nothing. ... phew... in a twisted way.

spliced a wire from a drive power header to the 5v supply pin on the port. woohoo! all is working! both with the A3k and A4k keyboards!

now just a case of making something more permanent.


now, the battery corrosion. so i should be good with it like that? so need to put something on it to stop further oxidizing?

thanks again all

[darksun9210]

fuses, good idea, that makes sense. .... where are the fuses?
i think i'm going to send this board and my a4k board off to amiga kit, as i really don't have the proper tools or skills for the jobs that need doing...


@ amiga4000freak
yeah that's the one. plus it does have a keyboard - it was in a seperate auction
still the guy i bought it from is very helpfull, and we'd chatted about it before hand, so i knew what kind of mess i was getting into
i'm still pretty stoked i've got me one of the prettiest amigas - to my eyes- out there. (if not so much the tidiest example of the genre )

so to sum up.
Ram - sorted.
Keyboard - sorted.
scsi questions - sorted.
battery ... so looking at the photo, i should be good to seal it up with some nail varnish type stuff?

so far, a pretty productive evening

[darksun9210]

vinager and cotton buds, although i feel this isn't really enough... what else is there that needs doing?

[darksun9210]

woops, sorry about that :red face:

hmmm. not sure. sounds like you've got a fairly sweet setup. and the prices of these things seems to be heading skywards.
i got my A4k 030 with motorolin's psu mod, and a couple of other tweeks for £150 a while ago. now base 030's are going for £250+ and up. saw a vanilla A4k/040 with a couple of bits up for £500+ :O

a loaded A2k should fetch a good amount of pennies, just make sure it can run WHDLoad at least.
zorro cards seem pretty pricey just for themselves. but as with everything, you've got to have what other people want.
and they're usually, "what's in the box?" so have you got blizzard/firecracker/gvp accelerator? cybervision/picasso gfx?

i'm after ethernet cards, but dayum, Commodore A2065's at £180 each? phew! that's too rich for my blood.

but the market just seems to be going up at the moment. it's not been this pricey or busy for amiga stuff for a good while.

[darksun9210]

yeowser! all that for £110? that sounds like a pretty good bargin! that's what i paid for my first A2000 (totally stock) all those years ago.
two questions, ram on the accelerator card? (given that it's soldered) ram on the GVP card? fpu 881/882?

the accelerator's not the greatest, but there are a few 030 based jobs on t' ebay that are a resonable price. the amber card is probably the most coveted item there i'd guess, what with the market for scan doublers to be able to feed flat panel TV's and the like.

sorry, getting off topic a bit

[darksun9210]

ok, well, thanks everyone for your assistance i've learnt a bit today at least.

i'll come back to this thread if i have further issues, but now we're pretty golden

thanks again!

[darksun9210]

ah! good info thanks
not sure how much IO throughput this old 52MB quantum drive can push

tried it with an acard scsi2ide bridge, and cf adapter with 4GB CF card.
on boot the hard disk light pulses as it scans the SCSI IDs for devices, but then takes me back to the floppy boot screen. fair enuff.
stuffed in workbench3.0 install floppy, booted, ran HDtoolbox. no devices found

maybe get the bus terminated, and some 3.1roms in there, and we'll be cooking on gas regarding the acard adapter and CF cards

i've reseated the chips, almost as a matter of course really these days i guess.

one thing i have noticed, plugged a microvitec 1438 into the amber output, and with the 31khz disabled, i get a nice screen, but a little bit of pixel jitter happens now and then. switch amber on, and the screen goes completely out of scan range, still see something, but it's very corrupt.
plugged the microvitec in to the 23pin RGB port via the official silver 23pin to 15pin vga adapter, and a rock solid pal display.

i take it my amber hardware is somewhat non-functional? initally tried running an NEC1780nx multiscan LCD off the amber port, but for both on or off switch positions, i got "signal out of range" notification - hence pulling the old faithfull microvitec out of storage and using that instead.

[darksun9210]

didn't think of that, ok, i'll have a look tonight

[darksun9210]

hmmm, my microvitec can sync down to standard pal frequencies and up to most vga type stuff. i think it tops out at 1024x768 iirc... so, we'll see...

ok cool. buster 11 added to the list
Cyberstorm3+cybervision are kinda dream machine parts. hoping that the ultimatePPC team keep it together, and produce something for the marketplace.

am now on the hunt for cybervision64/3D's and zorro ethernet solutions.

did you ever hear about the ethernet controller on the wildfire A2000 accelerator - able to DMA direct into fastram. i'd like to see those performance stats!

3.1roms are on order, with a stack of zips

i want a couple of fully kitted out amiga workhorse machines, ready to rock when the impending x86 appocolypse happens :laughs:

cheers matt3k, all info more than welcome!

[darksun9210]

this is what i get with amber enabled on power up :/

not sure if it's good or bad or what? the LCD flat screens i've tried just go "no signal" "out of range" "no signal" on repeat