My 3000T restoration and hot-rodding

furan-

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Joined
Jan 4, 2018
Posts
79
Country
USA
Region
Seattle, WA
There was an Amiga 3000 tower on ebay for a long time that had a ridiculous price. I kept lowballing the guy for months and finally got it for 1/3rd of the price and got him to throw in a monitor/keyboard/mouse. So far I've cleaned out the insides, removed the unused drives (they'd been unhooked and dead), maxed out the ram on the board, and installed a CyberStorm PPC 200mhz w/68060. As far as I can tell, the 3000 tower is rare. It is in need of a lot of cleaning and some retr0bright action.

I've never done retr0bright, and I'm worried about a few things:
1) I'm in Seattle, the sun is pretty much gone right now
2) I'm worried that if I use gel I'll get streaks
3) I want to be careful with the 3000T logo painted on the case.

Does anyone have any advice about that? Thanks in advance. Here's a picture of the current tower (left), with the shade of white it should be on the right. I'll keep updating this thread. Right now I'm looking for case feet. :)

3000t.jpg
 
Hello,

i have wrote something about that, made on the front cover of an A4000D. You need H2O2 or something to made hairs blond: plunge the plastic on it for a while then put the same plastic under the sun. Warm is not needed so the daylight of a cold winter is ok .

Regards
Stefano
 

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Full submersion in dilute H2O2 is the safest known option. You don't particularly need UV light, but the solution needs to be gently heated (but not boiling, or even close to boiling). Some people have used a sous-vide immersion heater for this purpose. Also, the parts need to be thoroughly clean of dirt and grease for even results.

I have retro-brighted individual key caps in a glass of H2O2 placed inside a warm water bath. Works well and needs no sunlight (or any other light source). I do not have experience with parts quite that large, but the principle should be the same.
 
Do not retrobrite the panel right away. Practice on some keyboard, floppy panels, anything.
If I ware You - I would wait for next summer.
 
I retrobright cases all year, summer it works just faster due to more light and warm. I used to put parts close to most sunny window.
I use h2o2 liquid 12%. I spray it over parts and cover by thin transparent food wrap.
Food wrap is needed to keep h2o2 touching all surfaces evenly and prevent h2o2 evaporation.
I use it also for keyboards without removing keys.
In case surface is not flat, I use h2o2 creme, but creme may harden and contains oils so will require soap washing that sometimes may be inconvenient.
So I avoid using creme.
Rarely I use spray with h2o2 also to gently retrobright cases with electronics kept inside, like external floppy or cd drives. H2o2 light mist covers only external parts.
It is better to use mist 2 times than using too much h2o2 one time. It is better to do it 2 times for shorter time and check progress to fix issues meantime.
 
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I used Vol 40 H2O2 gel for my 3000T, worked fine. Logo was okay too. (just as keycaps don't lose their lettering, logos stay fine). I used baby wipes to thoroughly clean it first, wiped it dry with a microfiber cloth, and then used a foam brush to evenly apply the gel and covered it with plastic wrap and put it in the sun for a few hours--checking periodically to make sure it didn't dry out.

One caution: the real color of a 3000T is more cream colored like the 3000. Maybe it's the lighting, but that 3000T in your post is way too white. The 4000 was white like that, not the 3000(T).
 
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After doing some research, I'm going to try Jerome Russell Bblonde Cream Peroxide (40% Volume 12%). I'll coat the whole cover in the gel, put it in a shallow container and seal it with plastic wrap, then use a high powered UV light and wait a day or so (and keep checking on it). I will retrobright a few plastics I don't care about first to get the knack of it. Thanks for all the advice, it's good to know I can work this out while waiting for the sun to come back. :)

Currently having a hard time getting Fast ATA 4000 working. At first, I found 2 bent address pins on the upgraded chip ram, behind the floppies :( and fixed that. It just solved the mystery of why only 15 megs was being enumerated. But if I have the Fast ATA 4000 in the system at the same time as the PowerPC, it won't boot. At the next boot it gives the 0x80000004 "Something went wrong" guru meditation. This is going to sound silly but I always assume zorro cards have components facing "up" and that's the only way I'm inserting them (FFS I'm not going to try turning it around).

Anybody have any ideas? I've upgraded to the latest buster chip and made sure it was seated properly in the right orientation and no pins were bent. I disabled the rom patch option for scsi in the PowerPC menu.

I'm also having trouble switching to the kickstart 3.x chips, because I'm missing workbench.library (apparently), and that comes with the amiga classic upgrade that I've purchased on compact flash, which I'll be running from the FastATA controller. Can I just place that file for now, or will I need to install the updated classic os? I need to boot from the old drive first so I can get the CyberStorm stuff on the new CF drive before I can boot from it.

BigRamPlus (which I didn't need but yay ridiculous ram), and the x-surf 1000 enumerate fine on zorro, so I don't think it's an issue with the slots.

Edit: I have a hunch that I need the latest firmware on the CyberStorm PPC card. Like maybe the card rom is trying to execute illegal instructions that are emulated...or something. I looked at the pinout of the zorro bus and the traces on the card, and sure enough I am putting it in the right way up.

Thanks, sorry I'm a complete retard with Amigas still. I'm working on an old machine collection, here's a picture of the BeBox I received today (after months of IBAN problems and getting it from a small town in France!):
bebox.jpg

I won't be powering that up until I do a complete inspection inside.
 
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I took out all the chip ram and it still repro'd, so it turns out, two of the 32 bit pins on the 68030 on the board had been bent together. =O Fixed.

Edit: It turns out that was not the issue... I had upgraded to a new buster chip, and yes it was in the right orientation :| I googled the guru code I was getting and found something about zorro termination, so I swapped back to the old chip and it's happy now, all of my cards are working, I'm running from kickstart 3.x and running OS off compact flash.

I wonder if there is something funky about the 3000T motherboard and swapping out to the latest buster chip.
 
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Would this cause issues with the Zorro bus?

BTW I found that if the CPU runs at 16mhz, it's incompatible with the v9/v11 buster, but I looked at my motherboard and u104 is 50mhz and the bus is set to 25mhz.

I need to replace the battery with a coin cell anyway so adding that bodge wire shouldn't be a problem.

Edit: looks like the answer is yes! Hopefully this mod will make Buster 11 work fine. Thanks @richv!

Edit 2: Looks like my tower is one of the ones that is missing the 74xx08 quad input and gate that belongs in the U103 socket. Hopefully that also might help.

Edit 3:
I found a picture of this motherboard, it has an ls chip in it but maybe I need f with the accelerator.
took the old chip out of the plcc socket and put the new one in
- no bent pins
- put the 74ls in (checked polarity), swapped buster
- flashing black/gray
- so I took the 74ls out and put in the old chip, swapped back to original buster
- also flashing black/gray
- checked that there were no bent pins in the socket or on the chip
- double checked the direction it should be facing
- checked that I didn't accidentally scratch a trace


I can't figure out why I can't restore the previous state :(
 
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Edit 2: Looks like my tower is one of the ones that is missing the 74xx08 quad input and gate that belongs in the U103 socket. Hopefully that also might help.

You don’t really need this. Here’s Dave Haynie explaining why:

https://groups.google.com/d/msg/comp.sys.amiga.hardware/btAuiC7p-B8/G-KYqNGEBBAJ

Yep, the only time you would need the chip is if you are using an accelerator that requires it. Doesn't hurt to have it though.
 
After doing some research, I'm going to try Jerome Russell Bblonde Cream Peroxide (40% Volume 12%)

...yessss what i mean, look my pictures on the post above...

Cheers

- - - Updated - - -

Hello,

about the issues of your A3000T, please read this

https://www.amibay.com/showthread.php?102355-3000T-restoration&p=915524#post915524

The guru mentioned is about a very low level error (hardware level or a combination of not good driver like libraries or rom content of any card).
Look carefully at the motherboard if you see something strange, ad step by step, hardware and test. Be careful about jumpers and the missing 7408:
there is a reason!

Cheers
Stefano
 
I'll start back on the Zorro 3 in a bit. Everything works without the accelerator installed and jumpers back to default, so I'm less worried, I think I just need to read schematics and re-read the linked Dave Haynie post.

I wanted to try retrobrite. I screwed up and ended up getting developer cream when I wanted liquid, and I wanted to try it on small objects, so I diluted the cream (yuck) in water, then had a 20 watt blacklight spotlight spotted right on the container, which was covered in saran wrap.

I tried with a few things that matched the same plastic, one of a pair of 3 1/2 to 5.25" bay adapters there were on a drive inside, and a bay cover I'm not using (it's rare, but I needed to test a part of the front plastic). It's hard to tell, but I think after 3 hours the bay color has a match of the cream color of the Amiga 1000, which I think the 3000t was supposed to have. I'm going to give the cover a very very good washing and scrubbing and then evaluate if I really want to brighten it. The bay adapter is only a few shades lighter than the untreated one, which I think is right because it wasn't in the sun (and the other one is dirty).

Lastly there's a comparison with the side of an Amiga mouse whose cover I'm going to try (cover is very yellowed). I think the shade is "just right."

blacklight.jpgadapter.jpgbaycover.jpgmouse.jpg
 
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Well I'm embarrassed.

I took the board out and cleaned it, examined the traces, read some tech data, and found that:
a) my jumpers were wrong (I guess I had tried something when I was very tired.)
b) the a3000 ZIP banks aren't linear, each bank is every 4th slot, and my zips didn't follow this arrangement.
c) some of my zip slots were damaged (both socket pins pushed to one side), and one of my rams had a leg pulled up. In the a3000t this is behind the floppy drive, so it was hard to see/position.

I fixed the zip slots with a sharp tool (pushed the squished part of the socket back to its original side).

While I have the board out I'll clean it some more, replace the battery, and do the INT 2 bodge wire - if I choose to use the accelerator SCSI later, I don't want to take everything apart again.

Here's a happy picture of a naked A3000T. Thank you for all the advice. I also didn't use the 'f08 chip as I had the fast one on board, as richv mentioned.

naked.jpg
 
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Hello,

nice equipment, but you don't need to dilute the substance of H2O2, because water is dirty with Ca and other things, just use only the product with H2O2 and, if needed, the help of a brush.

Best regards
Stefano
 
Hello,

nice equipment, but you don't need to dilute the substance of H2O2, because water is dirty with Ca and other things, just use only the product with H2O2 and, if needed, the help of a brush.

Best regards
Stefano

I went to try the water method (that 8 bit guy uses) where he poors in liquid peroxide with some sort of reactant (a salon solution), but then some paste came out and I realized I bought the wrong stuff, so I made the best of it and stirred it in there. I've got an amiga 1000 mouse cover with just the paste on it w/saran wrap under UV now. Do I need to seal the gas in when using paste? I'm worried about streaks from the plastic wrap.

Thanks!
 
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Wrap is for keeping h2o2 cream/liquid wet for longer time.
If wrap covers item partially, the covered part will be brighter. The uncovered part will loose h2o2 to air shortly and brightening will break.
In such case solution is to uncover previously covered part and cover previously uncovered part with new h2o2.
Cream h2o2 will remain wet for longer time than liquid h2o2, so wrap is important in case of using liquid h2o2.

Wysłane z mojego ASUS_Z00AD przy użyciu Tapatalka
 
Changed out the A3000T battery.

Changed out the A3000T battery.

Thanks @ori1a.

I decided to go ahead and replace the barrel battery with the coin cell holder on PCB that amigastore.eu makes. Then I removed the old battery....

Ddk8S5j.png


yEeY4GC.png


I had thought the battery hadn't started corroding the board yet, but when I removed it, found corrosion on both sides. No broken traces and only a little leached in. I cleaned the area with alcohol, as well as by the FPU and that via next to it is working ok, even though it's a little bit stripped.

The coin cell holder didn't quite fit because of that 74ls74 IC on the bottom. So I used my own PCB snipping tool and snipped off the excess component leads under the coin cell carrier board. I added a little tape to insulate the bottom over the chip, just in case.

YyR1zI6.jpg


A tight fit but it worked out okay, and it's keeping time. :D
 
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Memory and retrobright

Memory and retrobright

Checked my repair on the zip sockets, fixed all zip memory pins using a pin bending tool (something in my soldering dental-like tools). I used the MBRTest-2 ramtests on it and it passed.

uIvHcAs.png


I'm working on a retrobright test of paste under plastic wrap. It's an Amiga 1000 mouse cover that was dark gold from the sun. This is about 22 hours, and with the plastic wrap directly around the object (with it covered in the paste). Tonight I'm testing paste on the object but the cellophane a ways away from the object (but still sealing the gas in the small container). We'll see what happens after another day. 20 watt focused UV LED spotlight.
22.jpg
 
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