My new toy (16MHz A3000D)

[Heywood]

After a series of fortunate events and some negotiating with my wife - I am the proud owner of a 16Mhz A3000D.

The previous owner seemed to look after it relatively well (unfortunately it arrived with a bit of a bump with the daughter board floating around in the box and what seems to be some minor case damage near the A3000 badge - and while the battle scar is minor, its just part of the story on how it made its way to me I guess)

After a quick conversation with Amigaman, I decided that I would take the punt and fire things up - and the short but initial testing went well (photo attached)
Since its from North America (came from a gentleman in Mexico) it's a 120VAC PSU, so I used my stepdown transformer.
There was no original mouse or keyboard, instead he sent a PS2 adapter for each (but I used an existing Amiga ball mouse I had)
I plugged my Samsung LCD TV that has VGA input into the video out of the Amiga and enabled the scan doubler.

So this is the current breakdown:

• KS 2.04 installed
• Chip RAM = 2MB of NEC D424258c-80 static column
• Onboard Fast RAM = 16 Mb of Toshiba TC514402-60 static column
• HD = 120 Mb Maxtor with a default WB and AmigaVision Install
• Mboard Battery has been removed but seems like there was some evidence of leaking - Amigaman suggested that if the scandoubler is in operation that the damage is non/minimal
• HD/Power LEDs are stuffed, one of the LEDs is completely missing
• SCSI Controller chip = WD33C93A-PL 00-08

Things that I have already ordered - some have already arrived, others hopefully will make in time for me to do something over the xmas break:

• KS/WB 3.1.4
• SCSI2SD v6 - Unfortunately CodeSRC doesnt seem to have anything available in Australia this year, so I ended up ordered from overseas
• Coincell battery adapter for the RTC - wouldn't have bothered on its own but it was cheap enough to include in the SCSI2SD order
• Noctua 80mm NF-R8 Redux Edition 1800RPM Fan to try to silence things
• 50MHz Crystal Oscillator - hopefully this can OC the 030 and 68881 from 16 to 50MHz

It appears that the PSU modification to make it run on 240VAC should be relatively straight forward - though I will discharge/check the bulginess of the caps during this activity.

If anyone has details on possible replacement LEDs (is there a light pipe needed too?) that would be great, I have seen people make their own PCBs but haven't seen specifics on what LEDs, I suspect my PCB should be okay.

Things I would like to get but aren't urgent - however if you have one or both of these not in use, please get in touch!

• An A3000 Keyboard
• A Pregnant Mouse

I like the idea of populating it with a RTG capable video card especially something that does digital out and maybe getting a network card too - the idea of a CPU accelerator sounds nice but I suspect for my pedestrian activities would be overkill.

I love the idea of a zz9000 with the HDMI interface and built in Ethernet and USB but probably wont get one because of the cost (I think the price is fair based on the market and volume - just hard for me to justify) , most likely VGA and a Plipbox and or/SD card swapping will be "good enough"

That said - I would love to hear some thoughts as what I should do with my new beast!  I've seen some people suggesting to get a recent variant of SuperBuster installed but is that only of value if there are Z3 cards installed - these chips seem relatively difficult to find and are therefore not cheap.

[intangybles]

What a fantastic beast! I will see if I can chase up some ideas for you!

[quantum8]

The voltage mod is very easy. I cut the jumper (and heatshrunk the cable) when replacing the fan and it works great on 240v.

I also recently replaced the oscillator and put heatsink on the CPU and fpu and now have it running at 25mhz nicely.

Also look at doing the INT2 mod.

I'll share my info from my journey with a 3000d 16 when I get home from holidays.

Oh and I have some LED pcbs if you want one too. Just need to order the 4 LEDs to populate the board as the original size ones are no longer made.

[Heywood]

Thanks for the feedback, since my post, some stuff has arrived - just don't quite have the free time available to do anything with them at the moment.

• KS/WB 3.1.4
• Noctua 80mm NF-R8 Redux Edition 1800RPM Fan to try to silence things
• 50MHz Crystal Oscillator - hopefully this can OC the 030 and 68881 from 16 to 50MHz

Really hoping the SCSI2SD makes it before xmas but obviously there will be enough to keep me occupied (in between the jobs I'm sure the missus will put on my list)

@intangybles - thanks

@quantum8 - you definitely sound like you have gone boldly where I plan to head, glad to have your insights, please share more of your adventures when you have the time and inclination to do so!

• I would like to take you up on the LED PCB, how do you find it looks with two LEDs side by side instead of the big fellas that used to be there? Photos might not be a good representation of real life I suspect
• When you say you heatshrunk the cable - is this because you just cut it in place rather than desoldering and removing it altogether and was protecting the cable from shorting against stuff within the case?
• What kind of heatsinks did you use, were they similar to the adhesive passive things people put on Raspberry Pis?
• The INT2 mod doesnt look toooo rough as long as I make sure I select the right pins - there seems to be some good sites with photos so I don't think I should stuff it, and its probably the right time to tackle while things are pulled apart in case I get cards down the track that need the capability in place, it's already there!

[quantum8]

- There is a noticeable difference due to 2 LEDs but there's no real other option now. I went one further and split the HDD activity light to 2 circuits; one for onboard SCSI activity and one for the zorro card SCSI activity. Works great for my purposes! You just have to make sure you solder the LEDs on at the correct angle so they fit nicely when the case it on. This seemed to be an issue for the original LEDs too.

- Yes I left the cable in place after cutting it so did this for safety. I also recapped the supply while in there. This improved the stability of the output voltages a little, but it was pretty good to start with anyway.

- Yes I used raspberry pi sized ones. The chips are larger than the heatsinks though, so I used 2 on there. I could have put 3 or 4 but thought this would probably be more trouble with the overhang of the heatsinks. It might be worth sourcing appropriately sized sinks though!

- INT2 is simple enough, and you can double check the connection is made by testing the wires from the topside of the board.

One note on the 50mHz oscillator; your machine will run at 25mhz due to the way the 030 functions. It accesses everything on the 2nd clock edge so whatever oscillator you use, the CPU speed will be half. This is why the 16mhz machine has a 32mhz oscillator in them.

[Heywood]

Sorry for the delay in updates - had a bit of quiet time today - and officially received the A3000 yesterday as my xmas gift, so this was my first real opportunity to start to do things.

• Opened up the PSU but the insides weren't like I had seen in other pictures regarding cutting a jumper wire (there was a bit of vero board with what looked like an opto isolator floating around) so beyond swapping out the fan for the Noctura, I left it as is at the moment.  I have a Stepdown transformer which will just be kept in service a bit longer.
• Installed KS and WB 3.1.4
• Changed the Jumpers so that it's now operating as PAL and the TIC timer is now VBlank based.

What I didn't do:

• Swapping the 32MHz oscillator with a 50MHz version - I started but piked out - as in I hit the 4 legs it up with a little fresh solder, then some flux and then tried using desolder braid but I felt like I was near the point of burning stuff so I decided to give a rest.
• The Int 2 mod - I looked a the board (it's a Rev 9) and underneath it there were a couple of jumper wires soldered between parts of the board - not sure if this is a factory defect correction or a repair by someone else (certainly felt like some of the screws werent in all the original spots)
• Fixing the LEDs - I found the Power LED snapped off (no legs) in the case and the drive LED still on the LED board but legs floating - looks like some mechanical damage here, may need to look chasing you up for one of your PCBs
• Change the PSU to 240VAC operation

What also didn't seem to work was my Gotek installed in the external floppy port - not sure if that is due to the DF1 enable jumper (but I wasnt sure if this is meant to mean DF1 mounted internal or externally) or if I need to set something different in ff.cfg to work for the A3000 that I didn't need on my A600

I'm looking forward to the SCSI2SD arriving at some stage - the Maxtor 120MB spinning rust HD seems to be the loudest thing in the box and while 120MB isn't shameful, a few gigabytes wont go astray!

Should he be willing and able, I'm thinking that maybe Amigaman (who brought new life to my CD32 and A600) might be able to give it a proper tune up at some stage.
[/list]

[quantum8]

The DF1 enable jumper won't make a difference for external floppies; this jumper enables or disables the second drive internally. Anything connected externally will always start at df2 for the 3000. Depending on your external cable, you will probably have to have an image mounted on the gotek for it to recognise on the amiga. Mount it and power cycle the machine.
If it's a proper external enclosure you won't need to do this.

[Heywood]

Ah that makes sense, I wasn't sure if DF1 disable would mean the external drive would become DF1 or not.

[quantum8]

Another worthwhile upgrade I did is replaced the video PAL chips with GALs...those old PALs generated a lot of heat and replacing with the newer ones run a lot cooler. I could only get 3 out of the 4 to get me a booting machine though. 3 is still better than none! And not I get a stable scandoubler output instead of the wavy image caused by those hot chips.

I've got some spare programmed chips that I've been meaning to sell too, but have been holding off since I don't know if the full set of 4 work on other machines....If you're able to bring the 3000 to a meet some time we could try and see if they work on your machine or not.

[intangybles]

Sorry for the delay in updates - had a bit of quiet time today - and officially received the A3000 yesterday as my xmas gift, so this was my first real opportunity to start to do

I'm looking forward to the SCSI2SD arriving at some stage - the Maxtor 120MB spinning rust HD seems to be the loudest thing in the box and while 120MB isn't shameful, a few gigabytes wont go astray!

[/list]

Did you get your SCSI2SD? Just interested on how you went, I know @Joey had great difficulty with one in his A3000?

[Heywood]

Yes I got a SCSI2SD Version 6 and have a 16GB SD Card in it.

To set it up I use WinUAE with a KS3.1.4 and WB3.1.4 setup and using the SCSI2SD connected via USB which is mounted in WinUAE - primarily because HDToolbox is fine with large disks (I think its okay in earlier versions its just that numbers wrap around giving an otherwise confusing view when constructing very large partitions)

When doing the setup with using the scsi2sd-util6.exe the "SD card start sector" value seems to be suggested to be set to zero by many people but others suggest 2 (this is what I have on mine) - I actually just used the whole 16GB CF as a single disk and partitioned that, however I am considering changing it into several smaller disks.

When I partitioned the 16GB CF using HDToolbox, I made a 500MB DH0 for Workbench and the rest as DH1 for Data, as I populated the DH1 large disk, things seem to sometimes slowdown - it still works but theres like a pause a t times - there seems to be common discussion about a 4GB barrier, so perhaps I'll break things into multiple 4GB disks on the SCSI2SD and see if that improves things - it hasnt caused me data issues but its not a nice experience.

It is so much quieter than the original drive, I think its faster but I havent tried a speedtest and that wasnt the primary reason for me to use it.

[quantum8]

Sorry for the delay in updates - had a bit of quiet time today - and officially received the A3000 yesterday as my xmas gift, so this was my first real opportunity to start to do

I'm looking forward to the SCSI2SD arriving at some stage - the Maxtor 120MB spinning rust HD seems to be the loudest thing in the box and while 120MB isn't shameful, a few gigabytes wont go astray!

[/list]

Did you get your SCSI2SD? Just interested on how you went, I know @Joey had great difficulty with one in his A3000?

Joey had a lot of strange termination issues...not sure why he needed 4 terminators!

The v6 is pretty simple to set up. I've got 2; one in my 3k and one in mt 4k and both work great. They are the only items on their respective buses though, so I'm not sure how i'll go if i ever expand that. Should be ok if I stick to internal I think.

[intangybles]

Very pleased you got it all going!

I used my v6 on my A2091 in my A2000 when I got it back up and running. I had to use small volumes given I was sticking with stock 3.1 and that worked well for me. I made up a cable to transfer the contents of the old drive to one of the new volumes on the SD, worked a treat! was intending to use that to hookup a SCSI CD rom too but sadly the only slot-load drive had not aged well!. I mention this I had both devices on the one SCSI chain with no problems!

Picture attached: