A3000 Discussion

[mechy]

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?

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. 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.

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

In most every case, i see no need to update dmac2/ramsey4. there was a bug detecting static column ram , however when you mixed sc and page mode or went to the 3640(which doesnt like sc ram) and you had to put a pagemode zip in the first socket. this was fixed with the dmac4/ramsey7 combo.

mech

[mechy]

All agreed upon!

I put my A3640 in by turning the (low profile) heatsink 90 degrees.

The Zips (I went from 4 MB to 16MB) were a Mother F***er to install, breaking one of the tiny flimsy pins and having to order another (4).  I have a DIP installer, but a Zip installer?

The SCSI device is not perfect or wonderful; I upgraded the chip because I needed to use external CDROM, Card reader, and GOK what due to lack of internal space.  Further it is unforgiving and requires a separate Active termination to work consistently; on drive termination need only apply for part time work.  I tried adding an ACard SCSI->IDE adapter with an evening wasted.

Can't find out if a FastLane Z3 works in the A3000; some say it does, some say maybe, others say no.

Twice I've smelled a burnt something, but cannot figure what unless the power supply is dodgy .  

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:

Dan,

I feel your pain on the zips,but i do so many i can almost do them blindfolded now.

The fastlane works just fine in the A3000( i have the 8.5 rom upgrade for them if you need it-needed for 060 use), i use several. You must have buster 9 or 11 thought. buster 7 only does zorro2.

I find it odd you say the 3000scsi device isn't the best. I find it rock stable and have proven it to people who claim this many years. Its almost always a termination issue or term power issue that causes flakiness,BUT alot of older scsi cdroms had bad firmwares-also some bad drives load the bus badly when they start to fail.
the 3000 rarely if ever requires active termination. Passive is fine but active is best.
keep in mind when using internal and external devices the ends of the bus become the drives and only those should be terminated.  no A3000 motherboard term resistors should be installed in this case.
Other problems with scsi bus is often caused by bad or backwards term power diodes and without term power, terminators dont work.

the burning smell may be the PALS in the 3k,they run hot, OR the pull up resistors on the slot board,they run hot also. any dust on them makes a smell sometimes.

Like many,i think the 3k case looks good but is a horrible internal design. i dont find them particularly sharp  but it doesn't take much to cut yourself on metal cases.

If you are ever fighting it and need help don't hesitate to ask,i think i have seen about every 3000 trouble there is.. lol

mech

[mechy]

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

I should of clarified that. It also does not support Z3 busmasters iirc.Mine as well be broken for Z3 use

[mechy]

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.



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?





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!

Adding a 3640(must use rev3.1 or 3.2) usually requires no chip upgrades, other than making sure you have page mode zip ram in at least the first socket.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).Some but not all have trouble with scsi and need the chip upgrade.

For zorro3 cards there are the fastlane z3,4091,zorro3 gfx cards(cv64,piv,etc),deneb USB,mediator. Probabaly would depend on what you need i guess. The deneb is a handy card to have!

the mediator is a z3 card,transfer from card to the amiga is dictated by the amiga zorro3, probabaly somewhere between 12-14MB/s (just a guess,i have never checked).

[mechy]

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.

good ole zac keeping me honest. I completely forgot about the 3.1 roms.. doesnt everyone have them by now :biglaugh:

Mech