"New" Amiga 3000....

[blanghorst]

So what does the Indivision ECS buy us over the onboard (Amber?) flickerfixer besides double monitor support?

[blanghorst]

It has arrived!  I am shocked by how tiny it is.
 
The machine is in excellent condition and boots up very quickly. I think the first order of business will be putting a battery on board. I think I'm going to try to do it without removing the board from the case, because I'm pretty lazy.

[blanghorst]

I also like the classic Amiga 3000 look with the floppy in the middle (left) bay, so I'll need to move mine.

[blanghorst]

Are there any utilities I can run which would show me the revisions of various chips, or do I need to open it up and remove the drive tray and read the print on the various chips?

[blanghorst]

Open it up to see the revisions of the chips. You have to install a new battery anyway...

Do you think it is possible to install a new battery just by soldering to the top of the board?  I am not sure I want to disassemble the whole thing.   Now that I think about it, I think I just soldered the battery on the top of my A2000 board when I repaired it.

[blanghorst]

Disassembling the board isn't as bad as you think. It's pretty straight forward. I think doing it the way you describe isn't the proper way to desolder the battery. The solder is resting on the pad on the underside of the motherboard.
 
My soldering skills suck since I haven't soldered in so long. I had someone else who had more experience doing that replace the battery on mine. If you have the skills and feel comfortable doing it that way, go for it. What's the worst thing that could happen?
 
I just don't think I would do it that way.

Yeah, maybe I'll take a look this weekend.  I just hate having to disassemble the whole thing, but now that I think about it, I may have done that with my Amiga 2000. I actually just soldered wires with a connector to the motherboard so that when I need to change the battery out in the future, I won't have to do any more soldering.

[blanghorst]

First, congratulations to your purchase! The A3000 will bring you many hours of fun hacking. It is truly a great system!

Thanks! It is a real beauty. I hadn't seen one in person in over 20 years and I think it is even more awesome than I remember.
 

I recently did a battery change as described earlier; soldering on the underside of the mobo. Works great. Only thing I had to do was to solder extra wire on the battery holder to allow it to reach up from the underside. The battery and holder is resting above Paula.

What I'll probably do is solder a connector on the board so I can just connect and disconnect standard battery packs. That's what I did for my A2000 and it worked out pretty well.
 
If I get energetic this weekend, I might just break the system down and do that. I've got a SCSI card reader on the way from Mechy and at some point, I think I'll use that and a CF card to replace the hard drive.
 
Speaking of the hard drive, I did have a pleasant surprise. The seller told me it came with a 500 MB SCSI drive, but in fact, it is a 3.2 GB SCSI drive.
 

As for the ECS Indivision, I have one in my system. It gives a slightly better image than Amber, so if youre picky about rock steady image, certainly recommended.

I'm pretty happy with the Amber's quality on my LCD. I have a Microway flickerfixer in my A2000 and the Microway card looks bad compared to the Amber.
 

Though I would probably go for the WD chip update first, especially if you are planning on using the onboard SCSI. Rev 4 is notorious for giving strange lockups for no apparent reason.
 
Would also strongly recommend a Buster upgrade. If you only have rev 7, Deneb USB wont work. You need at least rev 9 or 11. Vesalia have them from time to time:
http://www.vesalia.de/e_buster11.htm
 
Can also recommend a PLCC Extraction tool for Buster swap:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=29&products_id=417

Yeah, when I break it down, I'll take notes on all the chip versions so I'll know which ones I should replace. I have no idea at this stage which versions of each of the chips I have but I suspect some might be newer since it is running 3.1 and I thought that required some more recent revisions of some of the chips.

[blanghorst]

At the risk of sounding ignorant, how does one enable LUNs on the 3000? I just bought the reader and I don't have a PCMCIA to CF card. Is this done in HDToolbox or elsewhere?
 
EDIT:  Ah, looks like I have to have a working battery and use something like SCSIprefs from Aminet, right?

[blanghorst]

I typically use standard 3.6 V cordless phone battery packs and then solder long wires with a connector on the end so I can easily swap the pack and also place it away from the board.  I did go ahead and order the coin battery and holder off eBay as it apparently has the diode to prevent charging.

[blanghorst]

So, I finally disassembled the A3000, removed the motherboard, and soldered on the coin battery holder. It was a major pain to disassemble the thing:
 
1. Everything was going pretty well into I got to the two screws on the motherboard (the hexagonal standoffs came off without a hitch). I couldn't get them out and they were badly stripped. I took my Dremel and cut flathead notches into the screws and was then able to remove them.
 
2. Cleaning the solder holes turned out to be harder than I thought. The two holes on the + side cleaned easily, but the ground hole was pretty damaged and while I could clean it from the bottom, couldn't make much headway on the top. So I took a wire nail, put it into the bottom hole, and gently hammered it into it until it poked through the top of the board. I then cleaned the rest from there.
 
3. My hand slipped a few times and went across a few traces but fortunately, no shorts and the solder mask was pretty much still intact.
 
4. The moment of truth came and I powered it on and -- nothing. The power LED flashed rapidly and I thought I saw a yellow screen briefly. I thought I was screwed but then I realized I forgot to put the expansion riser card in. Once I did that and connected the hard drive (another thing I forgot to do), everything was fine.
 
Those guys saying that the A3000 is a pain to work on are 100% correct. Very cramped and uncomfortable, especially the short SCSI ribbon cable.
 
While I had her open, I did take notes on the various chip revisions I have. Here they are:
 
Buster: 07
Gary: 02
DMAC: 02
Ramsey: 04
 
Which ones should I replace? I know there is a version 11 of the Buster, but if I find that, will I have to replace some of these other chips for everything to work OK?

[blanghorst]

blanghorst
 
congrats on your new amiga 3k! Welcome back to the club.
 
I love these guys recommending you impossible to find hw. (Like a Deneb - they dont make them anymore and are near impossible to come by. Same with the Dmac and Ramsey chips. Not only this if you do find these items you will pay $$ dearly) You really dont need to update the buster if you arent doing a lot of zorro expansion.

Yeah, I noticed that too.  I can't justify paying $100/$200+ for a USB card, ethernet card, or an IDE controller for either of my machines.  I did have a chance to get a Buddha a few months ago for $75 and I am still kicking myself over that.  I refurbed my A2000 because I wanted a project and thought it would be fun to get back into the Amiga.  I bought the A3000 because I always wanted one when I was a college kid but couldn't afford one.  It is probably my favorite Amiga model even though it is a pain to work on.
 

As a side note, some LCD monitors work very well with the built in Flicker Fixer (best feature of a3k)

Looks wonderful on a cheap Acer 19" widescreen LCD that I also have attached to my secondary gaming PC.  Much better than the Microway flickerfixer in my A2000.  I probably just need to adjust the Microway with the little screw.
 

and YES the A3000 is THE WORST hands down Amiga to work on. (as you can see)
 
Oh and ONE MORE IMPORTANT THING: DONT PULL THE A3k battery without replacing it immediately IIRC the A3000 NVRAM is stored in battery memory and this controls the scsi..

Yeah, it came without a battery but it booted fine.  Now that I've got my new battery installed and working, I need to connect the card reader I bought from Mechy, enable LUNs, and see if I can get all that working.

[blanghorst]

Take it slow, sounds like you are in the same position I am in. I've spent more money than I probably should have, but then again I've been tempted but have refrained from spending much more. By taking it slow I've gotten my stuff inexpensively and have no real worries - if I decide to bail out of this hobby, I can definitely get all my money back.

That's my thought as well. I haven't done much with my Amiga 2000 since I restored it, so I don't want to spend tremendous amounts of money in case I never really get back into the hobby. Still, I've had a good time so far.
 

Like you it seems, what's driving me is the challenge of getting these things up and running and the nostalgic appeal. Who knows how long your interest will last, so don't go overboard. I'd never pay the prices some of these products are demanding - just not worth it for me!

Yeah, the prices for USB and ethernet are just insane. I understand that it is a very small market and the companies making them have to make money off of them, but the prices are still too high IMO.
 
For my part, I focus on classic Amiga stuff anyway. I have no interest in running 4.0 or above. If it can't run on a classic machine, it isn't something I care about. USB or ethernet would be nice to have just to aid in transferring files, but I can get SCSI ZIP drives cheaper and I have an old USB ZIP drive attached to my PC so transferring files is easy.
 

Unfortunately I now have more "toys" than I have time to play with. Amiga 4000T, 3000, C128D, C128, C64C and soon an Atari 800.... ugh... it's an addiction!

If I keep up this hobby, I think an A1000 and A4000 will eventually find their way into my home. I'll be redoing my mancave in the next year or so and when I do, I may make it more like Blake Patterson's "Byte Cellar" and I'll have more room for my machines. My wife will just roll her eyes but she'll get over it.
 
I've also got another project I'm considering, and it will be a long and hard project to complete.  Basically, I'd be building another A2000 from the ground up.  I'd be buying individual components and building it completely from scratch.   The reason I say it would be challenging is because I do have another A2000 motherboard that has some significant battery damage.  It is repairable, but I'd need to remove some sockets (like the 68000 socket) and solder on replacements.  I have to decide if I really want to do this or not, as there is a complete A2000 case up on eBay right now.
 

Just remember if your battery dies it will no longer boot to the CF card slot until you boot to floppy and re-enable LUNs. You can, however, boot to the CF card in a PCMCIA adapter (if you have one) if the battery dies.

Good point. I should probably use a CF with an adapter as my primary boot drive anyway. Right now I've got a vanilla install of 3.1 on a 3.2 GB SCSI drive and I'm not sure how long that drive will last. I'll probably have to do the same thing to my A2000 as well, as I'm not sure my 20+ year-old 52 MB Quantum drive will last much longer.

[blanghorst]

I'm hoping to get my SCSI cable today or tomorrow so I can install the SCSI card reader.
 
Question for everyone -- has anyone found an external case which works well with the card reader?  Right now, I'll have to place it internally but it would be nice to use it externally.

[blanghorst]

Is there a smaller scsi reader you could mount inside a 3k?

Mechy's reader should fit inside the A3000.  I was just exploring the possibility of making it external in order to have easier access to it.
 
External SCSI, 1 bay SCSI cases are getting hard to find.  I'd like an external CD-ROM, but the external SCSI CD-ROMs on eBay are expensive and I can't seem to find a good case so I could buy an internal SCSI drive and mount it myself.