A3000 Discussion

[ChaosLord]

I never upgraded any chips in any of my A3000s and never needed to in the slightest.  Always worked fine.

I think u r crazy to "upgrade" ur SCSI chip.

I have owned many Amiga hard drive controllers and the built in SCSI chip in the A3000 is by far the best one.  Its the only one I ever had that supported removeable media properly.

Its super fast, uses little CPU time.  There is nothing more that u could ask for.

My U202 (or was it U203) PAL chip went out on me and I had to replace it.  I think every A3000 owner had to do this.


The smallness of the case is why I never liked the A3000.  The case was designed by that mentally retarded PepsiCo guy who had no business sweeping the floors of Commodore Business Machines, much less running the company.  He TOTALLY RUINED THE A3000.  He intentionally made it incompatible to the Video Toaster.  Yeah, just TRY to cram a video toaster in there.

The fact that the A3000 came with awesome Amber chip and Awesome SCSI chip was just a  credit to the engineers who snuck stuff onto the motherboard when dumbass pepsico guy was not looking.

The A3000 does have 32-bit chipram, making it the absolute best ECS machine ever.   And it has Zorro 3 slots, right?  So that is a big +

My first A3000 system was around $3000.00 with monitor.  My 2nd was a couple of years later when C= had them on sale for $700.00 so I bought a 2nd one.  YAHOO!  Then the A4000 came out right afterwards which cost me another $3300.00 with monitor iirc.  How did they go broke with me giving them so much money?

[ChaosLord]

I don't understand how u got an A3640 card in your A3000?

I have 2 A3640 cards laying around here (and 2 Amiga 3000s) but no way could those giant things ever fit in there.  They have a giant heat sink on them.

[ChaosLord]

Interesting thread.. some of my observations if you dont mind

1. The a3000 is the hardest amiga to take apart and work on/upgrade

+1

2. The reason the a3000 is so small is because they were competing with the pc formfactors at that time and had to reduce the size drastically from the a2k.

"They" were not competing against anything or anyone.  Mr. Pepsico (I forgot his real name) wanted the Amiga to "be cool like that NeXt machine" which came in a stupid crappy pizza box case.

3. Buster 11 is NOT necessary unless you are using high end zorro3 boards or certain boards.

Probably right.  I only ever had..... a Symposium voicemail card, which did not even do DMA at all.

4. Upgrading scsi chip will NOT increase speed and probably only helps with multiple devices. If you have a couple of units the default chip is fine. the a3000 scsi is very fast for an amiga as it has DMA and with a fast scsi drive is a sweet setup.

Makes sense.  I only ever had 2 drives on my A3000s.  1 internal hard drive + 1 external Magneto-Optical read/write removeable media drive with a stack of disks.  Oh wait, for a few years I had 2 internal hard drives + the external MO drive.

I was intentionally trying to break 1 of the drives.  It was only 100MB and way to small to be useful for much back in 1990s.  So I ran my voicemail on it 24/7 trying to make the drive break.  But dammit, that Quantum drive just would not die.

And my A3000 was one of the very very first ones.  It did not even come with a kickstart ROM.  It loaded kickstart off the HD which was very very kewl and ez to upgrade to a new kickstart.

So I say the original SCSI chip is good for 2 internal drives + 1 external drive, at least.

5. a3640 fits fine with a low profile heatsink (like the one that came on the amiga technologies a3640)

+1

6. The Video Toaster 4000 fits perfectly in an a3000,

At the introduction of the Amiga 3000 and for a few years thereafter, there was only 1 VideoToaster and it only fit in the A2000.

[ChaosLord]

The earlier WD SCSI chips are buggy with disconnect/reconnect which you can avoid with fast drives altogether. With tape drives and/or CD-Rs it may become an issue.

Weird that I never encountered this bug in all my A3000 years 1990-1998.  My MO Drive was really really sloooow.  I think it only wrote at like 75KB/sec

What are the symptoms of this buggy disconnect/reconnect?
Or how would I know if I had the bug?

[ChaosLord]

Did they really have to sharpen the metal edges inside the computer?  Could they just used razor wire, or land mines?  My hands look like (and feel like) H.e.l.l.:angel:

One time my outer case was laying on the floor upside down.  I walked into the room and stepped right on it with all my force in my bare feet.  I got cut really bad and blood was gushing everywhere.  I never did that again!

[ChaosLord]

you obviously never pushed it. The -04 chips have a known broken scsi2  command set and many have trouble with multiple drives on the chain. The  newer chip fixes these bugs.

 Yep I keep hearing that.  I just never experience it myself

Maybe my 2nd A3000 came with an upgraded chip since it was a year or 2 after the first.  Dunno.

Also, when going to a A3640,sometimes you will start seeing errors and scsi bus problems,and the upgrade will fix this also. It is one of the reasons some people say the 3640 will not work in their A3000.

AHA!  Thanx for the infos!  It is possible someone told me this many years ago and that is why I gave up on putting the A3640 in my A3000.  I think I just forgot all this a long time ago.

I am not even sure I want an A3640 card in my A3000.
1. I would have to upgrade a bunch of chips.  Are they socketed?
2. I would get massive increase in cpu power but I donno how fast the A3640 would write to chipram.  I am afraid that chipram writes would drop to halfspeed or quarterspeed.  Does anyone have bustest results for A3000+A3640?

Many A3000's came with buster 7's also and this means non working zorro3(only zorro2). Buster 9 or 11 fixed this.

I never owned a Zorro 3 card.  Are there any Z3 cards worth getting in 2012?

I might possibly get a Mediator for my A3000 to get PCI slots and a 256MB gfx card.  I guess mediator is a Z3 card?  Anybody knows what the transfer speed over the Mediator bus is in an A3000?


p.s. Thanx for the knowledge!

[ChaosLord]

Adding a 3640(must use rev3.1 or 3.2)

I have 1 A3640 v3.0 so I guess it is useless.
I have 1 A3640 v3.1 so I guess it has value

 usually requires no chip upgrades, other than making sure you have page mode zip ram in at least the first socket.

ugh!  All my RAM is Static Column Ram.

this tells the amiga to treat ram as all as page mode.The 3640 unfortunately does not work with static column ram(unless treated as fast page).

No wonder I gave up on putting my A3640s in my A3000s

[ChaosLord]

The problem is that Kick 2.x tries to activate burst mode with SC RAM regardless of the CPU. Ramsey is only capable of running '030 bursts and not compatible with '040 bursts. Kick 3.x in ROM also solves that problem.

Does that mean I need an actual physical 3.0 ROM CHIP?

One of my A3000s has that.

The other A3000 came with the ROM Tower thingamajig that loads Kickstart from the Hard drive.  The file on my hard drive is a KS3.1
Is that going to work with any A3640 card?

[ChaosLord]

@DanBeaver

Does your external CDROM drive have an external powersupply?
I guess it would have to.  Definitely need one.

I had an ID collision problem before.  I was using old hard drives and had no idea how to change their ID number.

[ChaosLord]

Yeah I did the same thing one time.  I spent hours thinking I had broken my Amiga 3000.  Turns out it requires the daughterboard even if it is empty.
Hahah. Live and learn.

[ChaosLord]

Just to pound this thread into my memory:

I can use an A3640 card in my A3000 but I must sacrifice burst mode.  This means I get slower memory, but a faster CPU.  Hmmm...

Or I can leave my A3000 the way it is and use it as the perfect WHDLoad machine since so many WHDLoad games seem to have problems with 040 and 060 cpus.

Maybe what I will do, since I only have 1 A3640 card that is a v3.1, is upgrade the A3000 that has a real v3.1 ROM chip in it.  The trouble is that particular A3000 has a mouseport that has come unsoldered so needs to be repaired by a competent desolder/solder magician.

[ChaosLord]

Speech works fine on my softkicked A3000.

Secret Hint: If you delete the C:Say command or the LIBS:translator.library or the DEVS:Narrator.device off of your hard drive then you are going to have problems with speech. :insane:

[ChaosLord]

Thor FTW!