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Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Fri Apr 26, 2019 11:28 pm
by A10001986
obitus1990 wrote: I had also gotten my hands on the ultra rare Super DMAC 04 and tried to use it with the Ramsey 7. It worked fine on the stock configuration, BUT, for some reason, did not like that combo when I upgraded to the Cyberstorm and added Cybervision 64/3D. For some reason, the RTG graphics would not work with the DMAC4/Ramsey7, and only native video would work.
Interesting. Almost same here. The CS MK2 alone didn't work correctly with SDMAC4 / Ramsey 7 here, the mouse pointer was corrupted and the machine would freeze at some point; this happened on two of my identical machines. I think P5 never got their hands on this (truly mother-of-rare) config, so it was never tested.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:09 am
by intric8
This weekend I got an hour to do a little much-needed surgery Sunday night on the 3000. I knew the battery was still inside the machine, with bad damage but not the worst I'd ever seen. (Plus, the machine works so...)

I took off the case and carefully snipped the 3 little legs holding the battery to the motherboard. I really love these snips, which I bought soon after my friend Christian showed me a similar pair during one of the SEA-CCC meets. (This isn't the exact same tool, but it's the same basic idea).
IMG_0908.JPG
Ugh... at least getting the battery stand out of there was pretty quick and painless.

After that, and consulting with Mattsoft, I liberally doused the area with white vinegar. I could see the vinegar react with the acid as it started to bubble a bit. After about 50 Q-tips later, in addition to using some very light scrapes from a dental tool and tiny file (old supplies from my sculpting art school days) I got the area looking pretty nice.
IMG_0914.png
Spic and span.

After a final clean with alcohol and more Q-tips, I waited a couple of hours for everything to dry.

And then the final test. Woo hoo! :)
IMG_0916.JPG
Frankly I'm not a huge fan of doing this kind of work because it's just not something I do often enough to build that confidence. But it is hugely rewarding when it works out.

Nice to get that ancient corpse battery out of there and have things still working well. I've now ordered a new coin cell replacement which I'll put in at the same time when the fast RAM arrives. I put one of those in my 2000 and it works beautifully.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:14 am
by intric8
Of course this is a horribly unfair comparison, but I wanted to take a peek out of curiosity's sake.

This is the obligatory SysInfo screen of the beautiful (early model, stock) A3000 against my GeForce030'd stacked A2000.
3000v2000.png
3000 on the left, 2000 on the right. The GeForce gives the 2000 a massive advantage in this kind of test.

I don't have any plans on changing the A3000's proc, but will be adding chip and fast in the coming weeks, and probably a SCSI2SD card for working files. May leave the original 100MB HDD in there (which is a massive solid metal tank!) even though it's pretty loud. At least for now.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 9:29 am
by obitus1990
That's not bad damage at all. I don't even see any of the surrounding ICs with any of the green fuzz on their legs, or, any traces at risk. Looks like you got to it in the nick of time. Well done!

The only thing I'd add to that is to cover the exposed copper planes with some UV cured (mechanic brand) solder mask replacement, to help ward off further corrosion. You can even put it on those surrounding diode/resistor legs that got bitten by the battery.

Just curious, was it a GP brand battery, or a Varta? The Vartas seem to have much more widespread leakage than the GPs I've come across (sometimes I have found no leakage at all with GPs, but, I still remove them).

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 12:21 pm
by BloodyCactus
And I'd make sure the caps at C411/412/413 are not touching the pins on the socketed chip

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon Apr 29, 2019 12:34 pm
by Christian
I’ll bring some UV curing conformal coating at our next meeting to cover up the bare copper sections.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Mon May 27, 2019 10:13 pm
by Bulletdust
You need to see if you can get Amix (Amiga Unix) to try on it, the A3000 was the only machine capable of running it.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Wed May 29, 2019 6:32 am
by dalek
Bulletdust wrote:You need to see if you can get Amix (Amiga Unix) to try on it, the A3000 was the only machine capable of running it.
Actually there were A2000 models that shipped with Amix (A2500UX). It needs a full 020 or 030 w/MMU, FPU and a Commodore SCSI controller. There are third party patches to also get it running on A2000's with GVP accelerators with GVP SCSI.

Re: Dream Come True: My Very Own A3000

Posted: Fri Nov 10, 2023 3:30 pm
by jamesyoung
Amix is easy to get running - go to amigaunix.com, plug the scsi drive into your pc, forward it to winuae, and then install it and pop it back into the A3000 - that's what I did

The method where you hack the install script breaks the package manager, this method does not