A3000 Discussion

[Zac67]

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.

Anyway, the 3000 is the coolest and most beautiful Amiga.
(It does have its challenges when disassembling the machine or cramming as much hardware as possible into the case - but its not for beginners. )

[Zac67]

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

Zorro III works fine with Level I Super Buster (up to rev 7) sans DMA.

[Zac67]

The 3640 unfortunately does not work with static column ram(unless treated as fast page).

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.

[Zac67]

@ChaosLord

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

If you want to run a full set of SC chips with Kick 1.4 or 2.x and an '040 or '060 - yes. (The '060 requires at least 2.x physical anyway.)
If you don't want to get Kick 3 ROMs just swap the very first SC chip for an FPM type. Kickstart will detect SC as not working and deactivate burst mode.

@danbeaver
Make sure the onboard termpower picofuse is still working: no fuse, no termpower, no termination!


Re ancient Seacrate drives: these buggers seem to support dis/reconnect by inquiry but some really DON'T. I remember seeing some strings in AHA-2940 BIOS code that were probably present to identify badly behaving drives and circumvent the problems they'd cause without requiring specific user setup. Go figure...

Nothing against later Seagate drives, I've got lots of IDE, SCSI, and SATA in use and they're fine. But some models from early to late 90's were simply evil.

[Zac67]

U320 LVD/SE drives work fine with a proper adapter. Some models may require high-byte termination to spin up, all other devices are fine with a wide-to-narrow or SCA2-to-narrow adapter.
There may be the odd LVD-only device, not compatible with single ended, but I have yet to see such a device (got a terminated cable like this though).