Amiga 3000 with superkick roms, questions.

[redrumloa]

Hey! It's been a while since I dealt with this model, I have a questions.

Has anyone tried removing these roms, enabling the "Enable A2000 rom compatability" and used an A2000 2.05 rom? If so which socket does it go in?

[melott]

To my knowledge A2000 roms won't work in an A3000.
My A3k was a SuperKickstart machine, and as long
as you don't want to run an accellerator you can
use any KickStart file you want from KS-1.3 to
KS-3.1.I still have the KickStart files but I
installed OS3.1 roms (there are 2 roms) so I could
use my WarpEngine accellerator.
 

[adolescent]

Well, it's supposed to work.    But, I've never seen anyone that has tried or any instructions on where to put the single ROM.  BTW, doing this would also certainly disable the scsi, so this may be why it isn't commonly used.

[Castellen]

Haven't seen the A2000 ROM compatibility mode before, is it a jumper only fitted to certain A3000D boards??

I know some A3000D had jumpers to allow the use of 2Mb ROMs instead of the standard 4Mb (256k x 16).  It just tied address bit 0 and 17 together on each ROM, nothing special.


The A3000 addresses the ROMs at 32 bits wide, which is why you use two 16 bit ROMs.
The A2000 addresses the ROM at 16 bits wide, hence you only need a single 16 bit ROM.

If you were to make the A3000 address it at 16 bits instead, you'd put the single ROM at the lower half of the data bus D0 to D15 (I.E. use socket U180).

[Quixote]

;-) If you want to run an A3000 without Kickstart ROMs, it will expect to load the Kickstart data from the hard disk, with the path being WB_1.x:devs/kickstart, or WB_2.x:devs/kickstart, or similar.  If the drive is named DH0: or whatever, it will not load.  Remembering that up front will save a few headaches.  

Mind you, I'm not sure that I recall the correct device name exactly, so you may want to look that up somewhere before you start yanking the ROMs out.  Most likely, someone here will remember the exact device name you need.

[Castellen]

@Quixote:
Those are the correct device and path names.
However, the computer needs the special OS 1.4 "softboot" ROMs in order to do this.

The kickstart image is loaded from WB_2.x but in order to do so, the CPU needs to be able to use the SCSI controller, it needs to know the memory address range, etc.

If you power the computer up with no ROMs it will not do anything, because on startup the 68030 doesn't know how to do anything other than begin executing code from it's boot vector (the start of the ROM address range).

[Jeff]

I tried this years ago on a Super Kickstart equiped A3000 and the machine would not boot with the A500/2000 rom installed in either socket with the jumper changed. Perhaps somebody else made this work but I couldn't.

Good Luck,
Jeff