Quirks of the A3000.

[Ral-Clan]

I have an A3000, which (as you might have read in my other thread "Wither Natami?") now needs to become my main Amiga as my A2000 suffered a hardware failure.

However, there have always been a couple of strange behaviour(s) with this A3000 I have never been able to determine the cause of:

1) it doesn't seem to like *certain* SCSI devices hooked to the external port at all (even when properly terminated).  I power on the external SCSI device, then the A3000.  If it likes the device, the A3000 turns on and boots up fine.  If it DOESN'T like the device, the power button does NOTHING.  The A3000 acts totally dead, as if the power button were malfunctioning.  When I remove the external device the A3000 works just fine again.   Now, if I turn the A3000 on BEFORE the culprit SCSI device, then do a warm reboot, the A3000 will recognise the device just fine and I can use it.  Very STRANGE!

2) This A3000 has a CyberVision-64 board installed.  Occassionally it boots up and the CyberVision board is not recognized or initialized (like it hasn't been plugged in).  Showconfig does not indicate the board is active either.  When this happens I just shut off the Amiga for a few minutes and a cold reboot usually works.

3) Very rarely, during boot-up, I get a RAMLIB 8000003 (or something like that) error.

This Amiga has a Mercury 040 card with 32MB RAM and 16MB on the motherboard.  It has all the latest chips on the motherboard except the one that is super hard to find (the DMAC?, can't remember.).

If anyone has experiences similar issues, or knows why they occur, I would appreciate the help.  I'd really love to know why Amiga hardware sometimes does absolutely mysterious things.

[Ral-Clan]

Yes, you're right.  I think I am using a properly paired set of chips, but it's the older set.  When I realised it was almost impossible to get the newer DMAC (or Ramsey) I kept the older companion chip in there too, for compatiblity.

[Ral-Clan]

That's the exact error I get! (the one in the screenshot you linked to).

I remember I used to get it all the time when OS3.9 tried to load Amidock.  The attempt to load Amidock would actually freeze the Amiga after the error message popped up.  Only setting the hard drive mask or maxtransfer low fixed it.  It was very wierd.  But even with the maxtransfer set, it occassionally still pops up.  

You're right though, I think it only happens with OS3.9.