What are the slots on the A3000D daughterboard?

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For anyone who has the manual for the A3000D, could you tell me what specifically the 3 different kinds of slots on the daughterboard are, and what kind of cards go in them.

Is the one on the bottom a Z2 slot?

Which one is best for the Cybervision 64/3D to go in?

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Hi Patrik, I have the card now, so I have to make do with what I have, (unless you want to trade it for your Picasso IV). I just wanted to be sure that I was hooking it up to the correct Zorro slot.

Thanks all.

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Hi Darrin.

Yes, the Softhut offer was a pretty darn good offer, so I took advantage of it.

If you put it in your A3000, make sure that your Buster chip is the newer Rev.11, as I learned to my chagrin.

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Here's the word from Dave Haynie himself:

Next we consider the Buster chip. The Buster in the A3000, Rev 6 or Rev 7, is a well proven design. The difference between the two is only that there was a small bug in Rev 6 that caused it to fail at 16MHz, but it works fine at 25MHz. These are what we called Level I Busters; they don't support Zorro-3 DMA or Quick Interrupts, and they don't attempt to translate local bus burst cycles into Zorro-3 burst cycles.

Starting with the unreleased Rev 8 Buster, we went to Level II, which is roughly twice the size of the Level I design. Level II Buster supports Zorro-3 bus arbitration, DMA, Quick Interrupts, and translation of local bus burst cycles into Zorro-3 "Multiple Transfer" cycles. There are two of these parts released: Rev 9 and Rev 11.

The Rev 9 Buster has a few flaws. The primary flaw, and the main reason the part was revised, is that the Zorro-3 bus arbiter can jam under the right conditions. Some DMA cards, like FastLane Z3, use a workaround for this (they avoid the lockup condition), others don't, and will lock up when used with a Rev 9 Buster. There is also a potential problem with end-of-cycle synchronization in the Rev 9 part. Some Zorro-3 cards will demonstrate this problem, some won't. This is made worse by the STERM* sampling problem on the Rev 3.0 A3640. A final problem with Rev 9 Buster was introduced by the A4000 architecture. The integrated bus buffer, Bridgette, used in the A4000 can't quite guarantee the propagation times required by the Rev 9 Buster design (done before Bridgette was proposed). In the typical case it works fine, in the worst case some Zorro-3 cards will have a problem with this condition

the rest is at THIS SITE

Software Hut has Rev 11 Buster chips

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Darrin wrote:

Ah, thanks for that tip.  I picked my A3000 up second hand so I'm not sure what the Buster revison is.  What happens if it is an older one?

Well, here's a chance to open up your A3000 again, so you can worship the interesting hardware architecture. :-) The Buster is the square chip next to the fast slot, half covered by my 3640 accelerator.

Heres pictures of all three Buster versions

Busters!!

If its older, you buy it from SH, take out the old buster, and put the newer one in. Tres simple. Be sure to have the special tool for removing those kind of chips.