040 board that WORKS in a3000

OKiez.... *sigh*, the saga continues.

Tried everything I can think of with my rev 6.1 a3000. Its not the installed fast ram, not a3640 board, not the kickstart roms and not the jumper settings.

It should work, but doesnt (welcome to Amiga land).

So I will simply bin the a3640 and start again. Can anyone tell me a model (or two) of 040 boards (nothing too expensive) that ACTUALLY WORK IN ALL A3000s!!!!

No required chicken sacrifices, voodoo incantations or "luck of the irish". Just something I can purchase and know it will work (for once) when plugged in.

If anyone is selling something like this please pm me and I will start a new thread in wanted hardware.

Any other accelerator intended for the A3000 will work without a flaw.

Too bad they are harder to come by than the ones made exclusively to A4000.

The most affordable ones are the Apollo units & the Warp Engine 3040.

You have to do the INT2 hack for those boards to work or have to disable their SCSI controllers.

@rakuer

thats a very good point my friend,

I think given the opportunity, I would suggest disabling the Apollo Card SCSI controllers - its woe-full and like fushitsu harddrives - choc full of epic fail.

besides the APollo SCSI controllers cannot DMA, the A3000's SCSI can =)

Resuming: Apollo SCSI is a complete piece of c***!

On-board SCSI from the A3000 is the very same thing as the A2091 controller (same custom chip: DMAC) and the very same speed. Nothing really ultra-fast, but reliable and lightweight on the CPU usage.

Hey guys, stachu is selling a Warpengine 040:

http://amibay.com/showthread.php?t=10590

Any by the way you've hurt my Apollo 4040's feelings :(

Poor little fella, I happen to think he's pretty awesome :thumbsup:

@Steve'o

the Apollo 4040@40 is awesome at processing and internal memory bandwidth.....but its the polled SCSI..... dire..... so dire.... for the wont of a few extra $$ they could of put a propper NCR based Fast SCSI 2 controller on there - and that would fetch upto 10MB per sec (7.8 actual) with about 30% CPU usage.

Alas - cheapness won out

Top end apollo's, have the fastest Fast-to-Chip RAM write speeds on any card on the current market (including the PPC) - (nearly 10% faster than Blizzies) but, other than some sloppy driver support - their biggest fail.... is the SCSI... or as I would say - distinct lack of it.

As long as you know what limmitations the adpater has the I feel you can make use of it properly.


I suspect in the 4040@40's case the SCSI would provide about 4MB per sec with about 85%+ CPU usage, which compared to the Onboard IDE of the A4000 at 2.5MB per second (90% CPU useage) really shows how bad the Apollo SCSI really is.

5.8MB with 30% CPU use - On my CSMk2 060 CyberSCSI2 I get
1.8MB with 10% CPU use - On my A500+ 68000@7.14 + GVP HC8+ SCSI
1.1MB with 76% CPU use - On my A1200 Falcon 040@25 Native IDE
1.6MB with 48% CPU use - On my A2000 Combi 040@33 GVP SCSI

That Apollo 040@40 + FastLane of your will be an absolute DELIGHT to have fun with I suspect you should see between 5.5MB - 8MB per second with about 40% CPU use - this is how the Apollo 040 should of been in the first place =)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by abraXXious

OKiez.... *sigh*, the saga continues.

Tried everything I can think of with my rev 6.1 a3000. Its not the installed fast ram, not a3640 board, not the kickstart roms and not the jumper settings.

It should work, but doesnt (welcome to Amiga land).

So I will simply bin the a3640 and start again. Can anyone tell me a model (or two) of 040 boards (nothing too expensive) that ACTUALLY WORK IN ALL A3000s!!!!

No required chicken sacrifices, voodoo incantations or "luck of the irish". Just something I can purchase and know it will work (for once) when plugged in.

If anyone is selling something like this please pm me and I will start a new thread in wanted hardware.

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I think the DMAC02 tolerance isn't good enough for your A3640.
Besides if you still have it in the bin, could you take it out and send it to me ? :D

Hi Buzzfuzz,

so with a DMAC that wont handle a 3640, you just get a blank screen? I thought if the Dmac was not up to the job it booted, but got hot and scsi would not work?

Quote:

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Originally Posted by abraXXious

Hi Buzzfuzz,

so with a DMAC that wont handle a 3640, you just get a blank screen? I thought if the Dmac was not up to the job it booted, but got hot and scsi would not work?

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http://mail-index.netbsd.org/amiga/1996/03/22/0001.html

Quote:

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So, if you have a DMAC that does not work with the A3640, you are basically out of luck.
What you could do in this case: buy another DMAC-02 (still available) and hope that one works with the A3640 bychance.
Replace the onboard SCSI host adapter by one on a Zorro II or Zorro III plug in card.
Forget about the A3640 and either don't use an '040 board, or use one with a SCSI host adapter of its own.

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Yes, as I thought, the Dmac only seems to effect whether the scsi will work.

It says that if you have a dmac that will not work with your a3640 one of the options is to replace the scsi with a zorro II/III solution.

In other words, even if the dmac is my problem, it should still make it to a kickstart screen.

At present I am getting NOTHING but a blank screen and dim power led.

So, it cannot be the dmac. :(