Dusting Off Amiga 3000 - Upgrades???

[amigadave]

I suggest not worrying about the onboard SCSI controller chip and getting an accellerator like a WarpEngine or other that has SCSI-II included.  It will be faster with the new CPU and have faster memory access to the RAM on the accellerator card.  I have two A3000's with WarpEngine 3040's installed that were a great step forward from the stock 25mHz 030's, so it would be even more noticable on his 16mHz machine.

 :-)

[Acill]

Amiga4k you dont know what the heck your talking about! I am sick to death of people stating the stock chips in an A3000 wont work with things.

I used my A3000 just up to 2003 with the only upgrade chip being the buster. I put in the 11 just for the heck of it and didnt ever have a problem before I upgraded it.

I used SEVERAL SCSI drives with my stock WD SCSI chip, never had a rev 8 in it

I used a CSPPC AND a Cyberstorm MK II and MK III in it for YEARS with no problems.

At the end it was in a Mirage tower  with a Mediator PCI board, several PCI cards like a SB128, ethernet, Voodoo 3 video, TV and a Spider USB card. All with only the buster switched out. I also tried it with the stock buster just to see and it still worked fine.

My boot drive was a 4GB IBM SCSI drive on the stock SCSI, I had a catweasel ZII card with some IDE drives on it and a DVD burner on it. Again never had a problem.

So your system with 3.1 roms is fine and you can put just about anything in it. Look at my pictures here on Amiga.org to see my old system up close.

[billt]

>Uhm, dont do any soldering directly on lithium coin
>batteries... they are rumored to explode when getting to hot.

I can testify that they don't like heat guns. And the stuff inside doesn't taste very good.

Battery holders are great. I ended up doing mine with a cordless phone battery last time around, sortof biggish bit us wrapped in plastic, rechargable, and I used some wire to move it away from the motherboard.

[adolescent]

@Amiga4k

I agree with Acill here.  

My A3000 DMAC Rev 2/Ramsey Rev 4 worked fine with a Cyberstorm Mk2 060.  

For the onboard SCSI, I ran a CD-ROM, 7 CD Changer, tape drive, Zip and Jaz drives, and plenty of HDs with the original WD proto chip with no problems.  I eventually swapped it out with an AMD chip late in it's life.

[InTheSand]

billt wrote:
And the stuff inside doesn't taste very good.

Err??!  :-)

What happened that caused you to taste the insides of a battery, or shouldn't I ask?!  :-D

 - Ali

[melott]

As an owner of 2 A3000's.. a 16mhz and a 25mhz,
my advice is (unless you have extra-ordinary good
luck and lots of money).
First don't worry about the origonal chips, they
all work fine.(I've owned my A3k-25 since new and
never found the need to upgrade any chips, (SCSI etc.))
I do have a WarpEngine in the A3k-25 (runs great)
In the A3k-16 I installed an A3640 accelerator (much
easier to find than a WarpEngine) and 16 megs fast ram.
As for a harddrive I've found the Quantum drives very
Amiga friendly (the easiest to setup). I'd go for a 3.2
gig 50 pin drive. I'd also get a set of 3.1 roms then you
can run OS 3.9 (although OS 3.1 is nice)
And if you are lucky enough to find one, a CyberVision
64 GFX card is is a great addition.

Oh, and as far as the coin battery is concerned ... the
3 volt coin battery probably only works in less than half
of the Amigas its tried in (I'll probably get an arguement
here ;-) ) Also I've been using my A3k-25 for the last 3
or so years without a battery with no ill efects.

Other than that.. I'd say use the machine for awhile..
before deciding what else you want to do.

[Rod_cl]

I know it would be better to have an external scsi port, but until now i still couldn't buy a Warpengine or MKIII. I cannot find one to buy!!

Any ideas? I really hate the 16 mb ram.. crap..

SAludos

Rod