A3000D ROM Tower Trouble - Please Help

[amigadave]

Good Morning! Well, today is the day to revive a couple of dead Amigas and LOAN one or two to my step-son and his artist girlfriend.  They spent the whole day with me yesterday learning why the Amiga is the greatest computer ever created and are hooked on learning more.  They are young, so I am not going to hand over my best Amigas, that means that I have to fix the couple of Amigas I had in the bottom of the closet that have been patiently waiting to be revived and put back to work.  The first project is a revision 7.0 MoBo A3000D that also has a little white sticker with 7.3 on it.  It has a ROM tower in it and when I carefully removed it, I immediately figured out why it didn't work for the guy I bought it from, one of the pins is broken off.  My question is, why do some A3000's have ROM towers and other don't?  Can I remove the ROM chips and place them directly on the MoBo?  I am guessing the answer is NO or there would not be a ROM tower in this machine in the first place, but I am asking anyway because I don't know the purpose of ROM towers in A3000's.  :-?

Thanks for any replies. :-D

More questions to come as we bring these dead Amigas back to life.

[melott]

I don't really know the answer to your first question ...
All I can do is quote what I've heard/read ...
"If your A3000 has a rom tower, DON'T REMOVE IT "

You can probably repair the tower....
(I repaired a 3.1 rom chip this way)
Solder a piece of stiff copper wire about the same size
and length to the broken pin.
And make sure you replace the roms in the correct socket.
Many or most of the rom towers have the rom position marked
in-correctly.

[Amiga4k]

From what I have read, the 7.0 board had an error in the silk screen. The 7.0 board series was one of those early models that Commodore messed up with the pin outs on the ROM sockets.  They fixed this with what was known as a "Rom Tower".
So, in essence, the Rom Tower appears to be a hack to re-direct the pinout of the socket to the correct motherboard pins.
There is no mention of the pin to pin corrections.

[amigadave]

Today is a new day and I am on to a new Amiga project, the A4000.  Thanks for the idea to repair the ROM tower for the A3000.  I was really skeptical about soldering a wire to fix it, but it worked.  The A3640 would not fire up but the on board 25mHz 030 is working fine, so the "kids" (18 & 20 years old) are now enjoying learning and playing on their first Amiga.  My step-son wants to be a programmer and/or network administrator and plans on starting classes next semester.  He wants to concentrate on Linux first and avoid Windows as long as he can.  I told him to let me know when he has the A3000 networked to the other PC in his house (I installed an A2065 card for him but need to send him drivers and software).  I also told him to join us here often as this is the place to find many answers to the questions he is likely to have.

I feel like the proud mother that has given birth to a new Amiga user.