Amiga 3000D and Fastlane Z3

[dnelsonfl]

Hello, I'm having problems getting a Fastlane Z3 to work with my Amiga 3000D. I've looked through the archives for simliar threads, but I wasn't able to find a similar thread.

The A3000D has 16MB fast ram, 2MB chip ram, SCSI rev8 on the native controller, and SuperBuster 11. A Seagate 4GB SCSI drive is connected to the native controller. The native controller is properly terminated on both ends. I have tried removing all expansion cards except the Fastlane and it made no difference. The problems persist.

The problems are as follows. With no devices connected to the Fastlane, the Amiga will not boot. I tried with and without the Fastlane's termination resisters installed. The Fastlane will boot with an external device, an internal device, or both. As long as there is something attached and the terminations are set correctly the Amiga will boot. However, the z3scsi.device is not accessable and the Amiga cannot see any devices attached to the Fastlane. I checked the early startup's expansion board diagnosis and the Fastlane is recognized as working. It's actually recognized as two devices (one for the memory and one for the SCSI controller). It has 64MB of RAM, and the RAM does show up on the Amiga.

I only have the German manual and a poor English translation done by Microsoft Word. I don't understand German, so I struggle with the translation. I see that there are two jumpers "SCSI-Device Config Jumper" and "Termination Power Jumper" that I should probably look at. But I do not know what the proper jumper settings should be, and the translation isn't good enough to help me locate the instructions.

Any suggestions would be most welcome. Although the manual mostly talks about the A4000, it does mention the A3000 quite often. So surely it must work with an A3000, right? I'm hopeful. :-)

-David

[miles]

This may help you with the jumpers.

http://www.amiga-hardware.com/fastlanez3.html

[Cyberus]

Hi,
After some searching, I managed to find no Fastlane manual on the net in English.

Then I happened upon this. Why didn't I think before? The Warren Block's excellent Amiga 4000 Hardware Guide

Regards,
Cyberus

[Ilwrath]

Yep... From Warren Block's FAQ that Cyberus linked to....

For fitting inside the A3000, the Buster revision level MUST be -09 or higher.

I would guess that is most likely your problem.  And, really, the FastLane Z3 likes the SuperBuster 11 even more.

[voxel]

@Ilwrath :-)

read his first post better, it have a buster 11 ;-)

[voxel]

@ dnelsonfl :-)

where did you find the english manual?

BTW, be sure that the device name is spelled well in  HDToolbox's icon tooltypes as Upercase and lowcase are importants for device names to be understood.

[redrumloa]

@dnelsonfl

Welcome to Amiga.org! Where about in Florida are you?

About the FastLane Z3, another consideration is you very likely have to do the infamous int-2 hack to your Amiga 3000 for it to work.

[Acill]

redrumloa wrote:
About the FastLane Z3, another consideration is you very likely have to do the infamous int-2 hack to your Amiga 3000 for it to work.

No no no, the int_2 hack is ONLY for accelerators with a HD controller on them used through the CPU slot. They did that so hardware developers would make cards like the Fastlane. Int_2 would only patch the Int sig to the cpu slot like in the A4000, nothing in the Zoro bus.

[Ilwrath]

@voxel-

read his first post better, it have a buster 11

Whoops!  My bad.  (I usually have at least basic reading skills... Oh well!)

Anyhow, yeah, I agree with Acill that Int_2 shouldn't matter.  It's only a processor-slot timing fix.

Firmware on the FastLane Z3 may be concern, though.  I don't remember how to tell versions, but some did have problems in various configurations.  I had to send my FastLane Z3 back to Phase5 to have it updated.  I learned a valuable lesson from that experience.  Never send hardware overseas if there is any possible way to avoid it.  :lol:

Also, believe it, or not, the FastLane and the CyberStorm series are not always very compatible.  

[dnelsonfl]

I've had trouble posting replies to the forum here for several days now. I'm not at home at the moment with all the information in front of me, but here's an update on what I recall. Thanks to all for the information, especially the links to the jumper settings.

Firmware seems the most likely culprit. The tools version I was using was looking for v7 or higher. The card has firmware 5 something. (It finally started being visible). I found an older version of the tools that worked with this firmware. The Fastlane is now happily letting the Amiga boot even when no devices are attached. Unfortunately I can't get much further than that. I tried attaching the CD-ROM but the Amiga hung when I tried to mount it. I tried attaching the Seagate but the Amiga hung trying to boot. I was going to try attaching the Quantum, but I'd have to manage to get an OS installed on one of the other drives first, and I'm not having much luck with that (perhaps a topic for another thread).

If this posts okay I will put all the details in later on this evening...

-David


P.S. City is Miami, FL

[dnelsonfl]

Ok, the firmware revision is 5.1034. Has anybody actually gotten the SCSI portion of a Fastlane to work in an A3000D? If so, could you take a peek at the firmware version? If it's a firmware issue I might be out of luck because I don't know of anybody who offers updated firmware for this. The memory side of it works just fine, of course. I thought the Fastlane had better throughput than the A3000's native controller. Is this true or am I not missing out on much?

-David

[redrumloa]

@dnelsonfl

Good to see another local Amiga user, we are few and far between down here:-/

I wish I could hep you more with the FastLane, but I've never owned one. However I did once try very hard to get a C= A4091 SCSI card to work on an A3000D, which simply did not work. The card was fine and would work on an A4000, but the A3000 would not even post with it installed.

Good luck!

[sys09]

hello dnelsonfl

I have a Fastlane in my A4000 working fine and a A3000D
witch ive bin onto Repair (Soldering a new Powerswitch)
If he is back to live i can put in the fastlane and
test if it works.
What do you think about this offer? Positive response will
hopefully speed up things a bit (the powerswitch is broken since a year now;-))
How do i find out my revisons of Buster and Fastlane
firmware to compair to yours?
regards SyS09

[dnelsonfl]

Redrumloa, you couldn't get an A4091 to work in the 3000, either? That doesn't give me much hope for the Fastlane. Not surprised, though, because I remember hearing that sentiment before. In an A3000 either it works great, or only the memory works. But it works great in an A4000. I'd love to find out exactly why some day, just out of curiosity.

Sys09, if you manage to get your A3000 running again I'd appreciate the help. To tell what buster revision you have, it's easy if the Amiga is already open. Then you just look at the buster chip and see if it says -09 or -11 (or something else) on it. I'm not near the Amiga at the moment so I'm sorry I can't say exactly where the chip is. I remember if I was looking straight at the Amiga it was close to the front on the right. As for the firmare of the Fastlane, I used a program called SysInfo I got off of Aminet. In the upper left side of the program's window, I could click and cycle through various displays of information about my Amiga. One of the pages showed devices and showed "z3scsi.device" (the Fastlane). Next to that was the number 5.1034 (the firmware version).

My Amiga is down at the moment. I'm trying to upgrade to OS 3.9 but ran into the infamous "resource.library" error problem. I've been lurking and reading other posts on how to solve it, and I'm waiting for some free time to get my hands dirty and get OS 3.9 up and running. I wonder if that will help.

-David

[dnelsonfl]

Well, I got the "resource.library" problem resolved in trying to install OS 3.9. Would you believe it was so unbelievably simple I burst out laughing? The install program that creates the emergency disk did not place the 68040.library in the DF0:LIBS directory. I have an A3640 installed. Bingo -- problem. I found the 68040.library lurking on the CD in the OS-Version3.9/extras/libs directory of all places. Copied it to DF0:LIBS, rebooted, and all was well. Wonder why the error message kept referring to resource.library when it was missing the 68040.library. Hopefully I can partition and format my harddrives, install OS 3.9, and see if I can get the Fastlane to work under OS 3.9. Stay tuned...
-David