Amiga 3000 repaired!

[RobertB]

     Duncan M. of The Other Group of Amigoids (San Jose, CA) not only repaired my Commodore PC20-III (see the Rescue with a Twist thread in the topic, Vintage PC), but he also repaired one of my Amiga 3000's, the one that I've had since the early 2000's.  I had bought it for $25 from a former TOGA member.  It didn't boot up, and Duncan had to repair it back then.  It had NiCad battery damage, causing a small crater in the motherboard.  Duncan snipped out the old battery, cleaned off the board, and put in a 2 gig mechanical hard drive with Amiga OS 3.1.  I had used that computer for years, and now it was acting up, giving me a black screen and not even showing an early start-up menu.
     This time he disassembled the computer and carefully looked at the board.  He noticed that the Agnus socket was not in good condition, something he missed years ago.  With some effort, he desoldered the old socket and installed a new socket.  Also when he tried to dump the old hard drive via a Zulu SCSI onto a CF card, he discovered the HD had a lot of read errors.  So, no use in trying to archive that drive, and he did a new install of OS 3.1 onto a CF card, i.e., no more mechanical hard drive but a CF card on the Zulu SCSI board.  With the new install, he put in a complete set of WHDLoad games.  With those repairs done, he tried to boot the computer, and it worked!
     Duncan noticed I had brought a boxed Spectrum 24-bit video card and a boxed Ariadne-II network card.  After we discussed whether the cards should go in the A3000 or my currently non-working A4000, I decided they should go something working, the A3000.  The Spectrum card went in relatively easily, and instead of using the CyberGraphX v2.16 disks that came with it, he used a newer (latest) version of the CybergraphX software.  Software installation was straight forward... no problems.  He attached the pass-through cable from the A3000 VGA port to the Spectrum's pass-through port; now applications which could not use the 24-bit desktop would be passed through to a compliant multi-scan monitor.
     He powered up the computer, the CyberGraphX logo was displayed, and his monitor came up with a 24-bit screen!  He adjusted the settings for 800 x 600 and then tried to find a good-looking JPEG image to use on the desktop.  Unfortunately, the JPEG's that he tried took a long time to load (slowness I attribute to the A3000 only having the standard 68030 at 25 MHz., though it had the new CF card drive and a 256 meg ZorRAM).   Instead of JPEG's, he advised that I look for nice IFF images to put on the desktop.  Speaking of loading, the A3000 took longer to boot up, because it had to recognize the video card and the ZorRAM in the system.  The benefits were the 16-million color desktop, the freeing-up of valuable Chip RAM, and the scads of Fast RAM.
      He installed the Ariadne-II network card, having to use a clamp to adjust its mounting bracket to align more squarely with the slot in the A3000.  He left it up to me to install the software on disk.
      We discussed OS 3.9 (which used more colorful icons and which would be good for the look of the 24-bit desktop), but I was leery of using it on a '030/25 Mhz. Amiga and not on a faster machine.  He put forward the ideas of using OS 3.2.2 (which didn't necessarily require a faster computer) or a BF9060 accelerator board (a thousand dollars with 68060 CPU!).  I didn't want to go the OS 3.2.2 route, and I didn't want to go the '060 accelerator route (but when is the Apollo Kraken accelerator going to come out?!).  Instead of further modding the A3000, we agreed that the Amiga 4000 should be next to be repaired.

          Truly,
          Robert Bernardo
          Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
          Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan

[RobertB]

     After this month's meeting of The Other Group of Amigoids, Duncan repaired my long-dead A4000!  Years ago at a meeting of the Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network, I had a Super Buster 11 installed into the machine.  As soon as we tested it out, black screen!  Discouraged, I put away the A4000, not thinking about it until Duncan said he would look at it.
     He opened up the machine, saw that he had previously repaired it, checked to make sure the Super Buster was installed correctly, and looked at the board for any flaws.  He spotted corrosion around the socket of the Super Buster.  He cleaned off that corrosion with a De-Oxit type of cleaner, and the machine was able to boot again!  A simple fix.
     Then he took out the mechanical 4 GB IDE hard drive and replaced it with a 4 gig CF card.  But first he had to build a solid bracket to hold the CF-to-IDE adapter.  That took a long time, but he didn't give up.  Then he installed an image of Amiga OS 3.9 (replacing the older 3.1 that was on the other hard drive) onto the card.  Though the image was from his 68060 A4000, it worked perfectly on my 68040 A4000.  Sweet!
     There was a strange Firecracker 24 board in the machine.  From researching it, I found that few programs made use of it.  Out it went!
     I'll have to think about adding other cards to the A4000.  Maybe a ZZ9000 which gives 24-bit graphics, a scandoubler, extra 256 megs to the system, and Ethernet (its USB is extremely limited).

          Truly,
          Robert Bernardo
          Fresno Commodore User Group - http://www.dickestel.com/fcug.htm
          Southern California Commodore & Amiga Network - http://www.portcommodore.com/sccan
          The Other Group of Amigoids - http://togausergroup.org