A3640 in A3000D

[mindprober]

I recently acquired an A3640 (v3.1) card. I followed the instructions below for installation in my Amiga 3000 desktop. The A3K has v3.1 ROMs, DMAC-02, RAMSEY-04 and BUSTER-11.

http://l8r.net/technical/t-a3640.shtml

Unfortunately, the A3000 does not boot with the board inserted. The power LED never changes from dim to bright and does not attempt to access the hard drive. It just gives me a blank screen.

The instructions indicated that the older DMAC/RAMSEY combo may present a problem with SCSI operation and advised to upgrade to the latest chips, but did not mention it causing boot problems.

I also checked my fast slot and all appears well.

Any ideas?

[dannyp1]

I've put A3640's in a couple of A3000's but I had the updated Ramsey & DMAC chips.  You double checked all of the jumpers, correct?  I had some trouble once putting a MKII 060 in a 3000T and I had to try several different jumper settings until I found one that worked.

Dan

[rkauer]

 Quoting The Big Book of Amiga Hardware:

V3.1

This card works fine in general however it does have a bug related to Zorro II DMA that causes some cards like the GVP Phonepak to stop working, when installed in an A3000. The PAL or GAL chip located at U209 should be -02.

Installation in an A3000

Though the size of the A3640 board fits perfectly even in the small A3000 desktop case, you can have some problem with the height. The earlier A3640s have a large heat sink on the 68040 CPU that would need some room in one of the two floppy drive bays of the A3000. Newer A3640s come with a flat heat sink that fits under the drive bridge without problems. If the heat sink of your A3640 is too high it may be necessary to replace it with a smaller one. One of the reasons why Commodore never recommended the A3640 for the A3000 is heat. The A3000 was designed to be upgradable with such a board, but the 68040 turned out to run hotter than expected and hotter than the A3000 was designed for. If you use the A3640 in the A3000 desktop, you always risk overheating the 68040 or any other part in the computer. This can cause errors, crashes or shorten the life of certain parts. To avoid heat problems, it might be a good idea to install an additional fan in the A3000. avoid using hot hard drives inside the case and not using it with high room temperatures.

The other thing to consider is the version of Kickstart your A3000 uses. If it contains Kickstart 1.4, the pre-boot Kickstart which loads a Kickstart image from disk you cannot use this accelerator, regardless of what version of Kickstart it eventually boots. If your A3000 uses Kickstart 2.04 then you can use this accelerator providing that you have a Ramsey Chip newer than revision 4 and you aren't using Static Column Fast-RAM. There are no known problems if you use Kickstart 3.1.

Jumpers

J100: CACHE & MMU at startup
Pins 1-2 Closed: Caches enabled
Pins 3-4 Closed: MMU enabled

J400: MAPROM

1-2 Closed: MAPROM enabled
3-4 Closed: MAPROM disabled

[amiga_3k]

Is your A3000 a 14 MHz 030 version? I had one of those and had to have it modified to make use of the 3640. Don't ask me what has been modified as I had Vesaila taking care of it.

[mindprober]

Yes, checked and double-checked with a nice, bright flashlight.  

dannyp1 wrote:
I've put A3640's in a couple of A3000's but I had the updated Ramsey & DMAC chips.  You double checked all of the jumpers, correct?  I had some trouble once putting a MKII 060 in a 3000T and I had to try several different jumper settings until I found one that worked.

Dan

[mindprober]

No, sorry I did not clarify-- I have the 25MHz '030 version (9.03) motherboard.

amiga_3k wrote:
Is your A3000 a 14 MHz 030 version? I had one of those and had to have it modified to make use of the 3640. Don't ask me what has been modified as I had Vesaila taking care of it.

[mindprober]

The info on that page appears to be the same as the site I posted. The chip located at U209 on my card is -02, by the way.

rkauer wrote:
 Quoting The Big Book of Amiga Hardware:

V3.1

This card works fine in general however it does have a bug related to Zorro II DMA that causes some cards like the GVP Phonepak to stop working, when installed in an A3000. The PAL or GAL chip located at U209 should be -02.

Installation in an A3000

Jumpers

J100: CACHE & MMU at startup
Pins 1-2 Closed: Caches enabled
Pins 3-4 Closed: MMU enabled

J400: MAPROM

1-2 Closed: MAPROM enabled
3-4 Closed: MAPROM disabled

[mindprober]

On a side note- can the updated DMAC and RAMSEY still be had somewhere? I checked Softhut but the prices seemed rather high.

[alexh]

They do not have stock anyhow. You'll be hard pressed to find a DMAC 04 anywhere except another A3000 (which sort of defeats the point).

Have you confirmed the A3640 is in working condition?

Are you 100% sure you do not have KS1.4 boot ROM's? Lots of A3000's without accelerators have KS1.4 which can softkick into KS3.1 If you did not buy the KS ROM's it would be worth double checking?

[mindprober]

That's a bummer.

I was told the board was fully functional when I purchased it. It was from a trustworthy source.

I'm very, very positive I'm using 3.1 ROMs since I installed them myself and I'm looking right at the labels that say so...not to mention that I couldn't boot OS 3.9 without them.  

alexh wrote:
They do not have stock anyhow. You'll be hard pressed to find a DMAC 04 anywhere except another A3000 (which sort of defeats the point).

Have you confirmed the A3640 is in working condition?

Are you 100% sure you do not have KS1.4 boot ROM's? Lots of A3000's without accelerators have KS1.4 which can softkick into KS3.1 If you did not buy the KS ROM's it would be worth double checking?

[joekster]

I think you may have to set the clock source jumpers on the motherboard to external.

[Lorraine]

/

[mindprober]

Yep. I did follow these instructions per the guide....unless you're saying the guide is incorrect.

joekster wrote:
I think you may have to set the clock source jumpers on the motherboard to external.

[redrumloa]

jdryyz wrote:
Yep. I did follow these instructions per the guide....unless you're saying the guide is incorrect.

joekster wrote:
I think you may have to set the clock source jumpers on the motherboard to external.

It may be. My memory is fuzzy, but the clock source jumper positions may be wrong.

[alexh]

jdryyz wrote:
unless you're saying the guide is incorrect.

The guide is correct.

It might be worth trying to disable static column mode within your Ramsey chip using SetRamsey? But I do not think this affects KS3.1