This past year one of my Amiga dreams came true when I acquired my first Amiga 3000. Then I found yet another. 2019 has been a banner year.
And over the past year the first one I acquired has quickly become one of my all-time favorite Amiga machines. For the time being my glorious A2000 is taking a well-deserved break.
In the 3000 I replaced the very loud mechanical hard drive with a quiet and nearly powerless SCSI2SD card. I also recently swapped out the also very loud original cooling fan with a far quieter Noctua. It's not A1000 quiet, but it's good enough for me.
My 3000’s are both very early 16Mhz versions. These machines are quite unusual, as they came from the factory with what’s referred to as a Kickstart ROM Tower. It’s essentially a Kickstart ROM switcher straight from Commodore.
This delicate and janky piece of hardware and software - referred to as the Kickstart/Workbench 1.4, aka Superkickstart ROM - allows users to hold their mouse buttons down on boot-up to access a unique Kickstart Menu. This then allows users to choose if they’d like run AmigaOS 2.0 or 1.3 for that session, with a further choice of hard drive or floppy for either. Technically when you make your choice the machine soft-boots into the selected environment.
It’s an exceptional feature and one I use on every single boot up as I’m a massive fan of the 1.3 environment. I've even created my own icons for 1.3 and like to use them.
If you don’t touch anything when you boot the machine it will default to Kickstart 2.0. I wish there was a way to hard-wire (or flip) the default preference, but to my knowledge that’s not possible. But it’s not that big of a deal and I’m probably one of the last people on the planet who prefers 1.3 as it is.
In any case, the way this 3000 is wired is strange. There are some oddities and incompatibilities that appear from time to time (I’m looking at you, SCSI).
About 2 weeks ago I received a new boxed copy of Curse of the Azure Bonds. This was my 3rd copy, and 2nd boxed copy so I could replace a very badly damaged gold box. My two previous copies are actually different versions of the game software, which is cool. I decided to put this new set into my 3000's floppy drive and see if I might have discovered a third version. Unlikely, but why not see? The moment I put the disk in the drive I knew something was wrong. The disk sounded like it was rotating on sandpaper. It wouldn’t mount to the desktop and every disk I tried to read now failed.
It might be pure coincidence, but the moment I put that disk in the drive, the drive seemingly died. I cleaned the heads, lubed the parts YouTube says to lube, but to no avail. It was the first floppy drive to die on me in over 4 years. Thankfully I had a backup drive and quickly did the swap.
Next I needed to perform a few tests to ensure the new drive was fully functional.
I popped in a fresh disk and was able to format it in a matter of moments (omg so much faster than my sweet little A1000’s). I was able to read disks just fine, too. Then, using the Workbench Duplicate command, I began to read and write a copy of an entire disk as my final test.
It would read the entire source disk, then start writing all 80 tracks to the destination disk. Then, on track 79 when it would try to finish up and mount the disk to the desktop, my power LED would flash a few times and my screen would go solid blue. I sat there just staring at the screen wondering what just happened. Talk about the blue screen of death!
I used several more disks and no matter what I tried, the same result occurred every time. Duplicating a disk would crash the machine. Thinking my spare backup drive was defective, I found and bought two more.
Finally this week the new drives arrived. I quickly put one of them in the machine and restarted all of my tests.
To my shock and horror, the exact same results occurred with the one of the new drives! I couldn’t believe it and quickly shot a flare towards some of my friends for advice.
My friend Matt asked me if the disk duplication worked in OS 2.04, knowing full well I was doing everything in 1.3. I re-booted and tried to duplicate a disk... and it worked! That was a very cool moment, but also created a sense of fear and unease about what was going on with 1.3 on this machine.
Next thing I did was take one of the "failed" 1.3 duplications and put it in my A1000’s drive. Guess what? The disk was OK! So when the duplication ended on the 3000 and the machine froze, the copy actually completed and the resulting disk was actually fine! And if I rebooted the A3000 and put the duplicated disk into its drive, the 3000 would also see it just fine! So the disk was definitely OK, too. This led me to believe that my floppy drive, and disks, were indeed A-OK.
Next I fired up Directory Opus 4, and performed a disk copy from there. It worked! By bypassing Workbench’s copy program, the disk copied in no time and all was well.
This sounds crazy, but I then took the “Copy” program from a good Workbench floppy and copied it on top of the same program on the hard drive, even though the KB sizes were identical. My thought was maybe there was some data corruption on my SD card. I was throwing darts in the dark - I had no idea what was going on.
But then my friend Matt, who also has an early A3000 with a Superkickstart ROM suggested he try to duplicate a disk on his machine as well the same way I was.
Now, his machine went one step further than mine. It actually produced a Guru Meditation!
Suddenly, the truth of what was going on here revealed itself: There was a massive bug in 1.4 - a beta product that shipped to market prematurely - that got through QA. Disk Duplication is utterly broken via the Workbench route in 1.4!
While the realization of that bug showing itself 30 years later completely stunned me, I was far more relieved that my machine was technically OK. And while I absolutely love the dual-boot feature, it nearly gave me a lot more white hairs these past couple of weeks.
Do you have an early A3000 with the ROM Tower still installed? If so, could you try to duplicate a disk using Workbench? It would be nice to get more than just similar 2 results to make this a bit more scientific and confirm that disk duplication is indeed broken in 1.4.