Amiga A3000

[redrouteone]

So today at the local Goodwill Computerworks I picked up an Amiga A3000 for $20. No idea if it works or what the specs are.

Guess I need to track down a keyboard and mouse for it.

 

[uniserver]

awesome can you post some pictures of it?

also open it up and look for cap leakage.

- take a photo of that is well

 

[NJRoadfan]

Caps usually aren't a problem in these. They still used radials which are much more reliable than the SMDs the 4000 came with. The bigger problem is the NiCd battery leaking all over the board. The nice thing about the 3000 is that it comes with a built in scan doubler. You can just plug in a VGA monitor. The keyboard and mouse are proprietary to the Amiga but USB and PS/2 adapters exist for $30 a piece (some cases its cheaper than getting a real keyboard or mouse!).

 

[techknight]

radials still go bad all the time. i see it every day in the oven range controls.

 

[CC_333]

Oven range controls?!

Our oven has been acting strangely (not igniting properly, being somewhat erratic when it does) for the last year or two. I opened up the front to investigate, and I saw what looked like some sort of electronic module.

Could there be bad capacitors in there?

Hmm!

c

 

[commodorejohn]

Congratulations! As has been said, you'll probably have an easier time getting adapters and using PS/2 keyboards/mice, but pretty much any VGA monitor will do ya.

 

[Unknown_K]

The CMOS battery holds the partition information for the HD, without a working battery the machine won't boot from the SCSI HD anymore.

A3000's are nice machines, built better then the A4000 that came later.

 

[uniserver]

so the a3000 has a 68030 in it?

ah here is a good shot of the motherboard!

pretty nice!

 

[NJRoadfan]

The A3000 uses the same type of CPU cards as the A4000. It came with a 68030, but the A3640 68040 card used in the 4000/040 was a popular upgrade because it is fairly common compared to 3rd party accelerators.

 

[commodorejohn]

However the A3640 isn't a particularly good option, as it has no slots for fast RAM, leaving the CPU stuck with the slower RAM on the motherboard. If this unit came with one, so much the better, but don't go out of your way to hunt one down; there are much better accelerators available.

 

[Unknown_K]

The 040 Commodore upgrade also runs hot and likes to bake itself to death (no airflow in that area). I think you also need specific revisions of the plug in card to work in an A3000.

The 68030 is decent enough for games anyway. You can spend all kinds of money for upgrades but if all you want to do is play games it is good as is.

 

[redrouteone]

The CMOS battery holds the partition information for the HD, without a working battery the machine won't boot from the SCSI HD anymore. ...

Well now that seems rather silly.

I haven't had any time to mess with it yet. Not sure what I am going to do with it. Maybe I'll come up with some ideas once I get it up and running.

 

[CelGen]

I've never upgraded the CPU on my 3000.

The ZIP ram was hard to source but was nice to run, the chip ram upgrade costs a fortune and ANY CPU upgrade for an amiga (3000/4000) is worth often twice the value of the machine. The stock CPU will run an OS fin unless you want to try and run that newer gimmick of an OS which to be honest assumes you spent around $1000 to max EVERYTHING out.

 

[firebottle]

The CMOS battery holds the partition information for the HD, without a working battery the machine won't boot from the SCSI HD anymore. ...

Well now that seems rather silly.

I haven't had any time to mess with it yet. Not sure what I am going to do with it. Maybe I'll come up with some ideas once I get it up and running.

Both my Amiga 3000's boot to the internal hard disk, and neither have a battery in them.

However, I always have to put an external terminator on the 3000's SCSI port in order to get them to boot.

 

[Unknown_K]

The A3000 SCSI timeout settings are stored in some battery backed up memory on the A3000 known as "batmem".

Depending on the drive (how long it takes to spin up) the machine might not wait long enough and boot without the HD.

Yes, the A3000 is very picky about SCSI termination, I have an external terminator on my machine.