How to tell what ROM version on A3000

[irishmike]

Hello all:

I am planning to upgrade my A3000 to the hilt in the next month or so.  With that Idea I plan to buy OS 3.9 and wanted to make sure I had the 1.3 ROMs (I believe) or whatnot.  Since I can not get into the system right this moment... needs keyboard and mouse first.... I was wondering if you could tell visually?

Please note my other post on getting to the mainboard... The Roms are under that shelf too.

Any help is appreciated!

Thanks, Mike

[irishmike]

Cool Thanks.  

[irishmike]

@zack67

The price is $29.95 USD per 4 MB from Magnetic... given how hard it seems to aquire these chips, I am thinking of buying 4 MB at a time once a month until I am maxed at 16MB... that will be 3 times for those keeping score.

They seem ok on most items as if you go the ebay route, you'll end up paying that and maybe more.

[irishmike]

I totally agree that putting in the ram in stages may be a pain, but my wallet says that this is how it is going to have to be :-)  I may wait to have the whole thing up and running until I have all the parts, but I may decide that 4MB is enough too.  Don't think the programs I want to run require more than 1 MB Fast RAM.

But if I have to do it in stages, that is precisely how it will progress.  I have been a Technician for over 15 years and though new to Amiga as a platform, not too intimidated by taking the machine apart and putting it back together too much.  Also 97% sure no rom tower

I do appreciate all the suggestions and if the means to do all the ram at once and the ROMs (assuming they are not already 3.1) then I will make that decision then.

Again appreciate all the help :-)

[irishmike]

@amije

Good Point, so I will have 8 mb if I upgrade with 4 but I should maybe do 8 then.

@everyone

I have determined that I will need the 3.1 ROMs, it is at 2.x according the bootup of workbench.

[irishmike]

well honestly I plan to play all my favorite Sierra Games on it right now, but I have other plans for a BBS (for preservation -- see post about my project in General Amiga) but I haven't decided if I may buy another A3000 for the BBS and use this one for the games... I really missed Kings Quest, Space Quest and Leisure Suit Larry :-)

So I just want those games to run smoothly, though on the PC side (back in the day) the more graphics ability and RAM you had, the better they performed :-D

But the AmigaOS is so much smaller than MS-DOS so it probably won't be as bad as that was.  But that was one reason for maxing out the Chip and Fast RAM.

[irishmike]

Yes indeed, I feel the DOS emulation route or the like is a real pain and of course building a Pentium (1) level machine and running DOS is of course an option, but the games are a lot harder to get than the AMI versions.  I understood that the sound was actually a little better on the AMI (and Macintosh) than the PCs were.

The other part of most emulators are they run too fast for the Sierra games and cause nifty errors.

So I think I found my ideal for that :-)  Even if they don't take full advantage of the hardware... like most ports from PC ever did ;-)