Amiga 3000D resurrection

[Worfje]

Hi all, it has been a while that I gave my Amiga 3000D some love and since the kids can use some distraction in these crazy times...

I am not sure if it appropriate to post my progress on this and which problems I needed to solve, but it would certainly help me in recalling what I did to solve them for the next resurrection in about 10 years.

So, after pulling the box from under the bed, I put all pieces together:

Amiga 3000D rev 9/02
Buddha Phoenix Edition (WD200 + Teac CD-524E)
Picasso II+ V2.1
PS2 to ZIP RAM Adapter for Amiga 3000 Desktop Revision B (with 2x 8 Mb 60 ns Fast Page memory)
Sum A234/CD32 (USB adapter to Amiga keyboard connector)

Unfortunately, the hard disk and/or Buddha died.

Convinced it was the Buddha IDE, I bought the new 20th anniversary edition. Conveniently, it includes a DOM with pre-installed AmigaOSs and sets up the hard disk (and cdrom drive... not correctly in my case) when required.

After waiting for the post to arrive, plugged in the new Buddha and still dead.
What the ...? Indeed, it was the hard disk that was broken. Checked with PC, dead. The good news was that the Buddha Phoenix was still working.

Found some old PATA hard disks and tried some, but when using the DOM for setting up the hard disk, I had some instabilities. 'InstallBuddha failed returncode 20' sometimes and software failures aka Guru Meditations. In hindsight, I think this is due to incorrect jumper settings on the harddisk and/or cdrom for master / single / slave configuration.

The software for automatic partitioning, formatting and installing AmigaOS3.1 is lightning fast. Great work on that. Next step, turning off the Amiga, removing the DOM and turning it back on. AmigaOS boots fine, hurray, but the cdrom drive isn't showing its loaded cdrom...
The drawer buddha_CD_Install was installed and includes an icon FindDevice. FindDevice shows scsi.device and buddhascsi.device and the cdrom drive was also listed correctly. Running the installation wizard (icon Install) detects buddha_atapi.device and trying to use this gives the message 'Failed to initialize: Can't find the BUDDHA Semaphore!' Probably the IDE driver is not loaded!'.

... time for bed and hope to continue to tomorrow with all things I ran into.

[DarrenHD]

How is your battery? Did you check it? Or was it already removed/replaced?

[Worfje]

Hi Darren, its removed a long time ago. Thanks for the tip.



Maybe I should dust off the poor thing...

[esel]

Nice looks like there is no battery damage

[Hedeon]

Originally Posted by Worfje

I am not sure if it appropriate to post my progress on this

I tend to say it is inappropriate to not post pictures

EDIT: I am getting blind...

[DarrenHD]

Originally Posted by Worfje

Hi Darren, its removed a long time ago. Thanks for the tip.



Maybe I should dust off the poor thing...

Looks very good...lucky!..my A3000 had much more damage. It's currently being repaired by Shaf (from this board).

[Worfje]

Indeed it looks good, I took out the battery a long time ago and on time.

To continue my story on the resurrection, the cdrom drive didn't seem to work properly. Everytime I rebooted the Amiga, it stated that it could not find the cdrom drive unit. I really had no idea how to adjust the Buddha installation and posted my problem on iComp's forum here.

Still not having a clue on how to change the current Buddha install, I decided to redo the install (using the DOM) with only a single harddisk connected to the IDE cable (jumper settings on disk as master/single). After the successful partition, format, installation of AmigaOS3.1, turning off the Amiga , I added the cdrom drive as slave to the IDE cable and changed the jumper setting on the harddisk to master.

Turned on the Amiga again and executed Buddha_CD_Install. At some point in the install wizard it executes FindDevice and list the Exec Device buddha_atapi.device with no connected units. This is wrong. You need to push the cancel button and fill in the information manually, which is buddhascsi.device and the unit number can be found by executing FindDevice (also located in drawer Buddha_CD_Install). Surprisingly, now FindDevice does give the correct information (in contrast when executing from 'within' Install of drawer Buddha_CD_Install).

[Worfje]

Upgrade to AmigaOS3.5 and also AmigaOS3.9, fairly smooth from cdrom.

I installed the Picasso driver (v2.0)after downloading it from Aminet here.
I also red (on EAB) that iComp had purchased the rights of the P96 driver software and instantly bought the newest version available (v2.4.4). Still have to install it.

Due to all those flat panel monitors, the choice for screen resolution was fairly limited and I could step up to 800x600 resolution. The scan doubler / flickerfixer of the PicassoII+ does a great job on the LCD monitor. Some repeating flaws in the analogue video signal, but okay.

But, I ran into a problem that the AmigaOS would freeze up each time I would open up a directory after setting to any Picasso specific resolution... what the...? I took me some time to figure this out, but per default, graphic memory (chipram) is allocated for each graphic component (like a drawer icons, AmiDOCK and the workbench background) and I was running out of chipram memory! I searched the web and the easy fix is to run the executable Workbench in drawer Sys:Prefs and change 'settings' to store icons in 'other memory' (see here). That solved all my freezing issues. In general, the workbench now uses up to 4 Mb of 16 Mb total (which the maximum physically possible on the Amiga 3000 motherboard). When opening up a drawer with a large amount of files that show up as an icon, it can easily drop to 10 Mb left.

Next step was to install WHDLoad.
Hurray, I found back my bought WHDLoad license in my email on my old PC still running WinXP in some backup directory of older harddisks! Later on, I learned WHDLoad is now for free... doh.

[Worfje]

So, how to get this WHDLoad on my Amiga? If only I had an ethernet card or a USB port supporting mass storage devices. The best I could come up with was double density disks. From the graphical interface WinXP wasn't really willing to format any double density disk and only showed 1.44 Mb disk format option. Darn. Searching the web showed a command line possibility here:

format a: /FS:FAT /T:80 /N:9

Still, swapping disk back and forth wasn't going smooth. Copying files from PC and using them in the Amiga went OK, but using them again in the PC for a second copy of some files went wrong on the PC side. The disk wasn't recognised any more.

How to get the 'unreadible' PC-formatted disk readible within the AmigaOS:

mount pc0:

assuming you put the disk in df0:

You can also dismount the disk (not needed in many cases):

assign pc0: dismount

assuming you put the disk in df0:

I recalled the disk drive of an Amiga is much more capable in regard to an standard PC disk drive. Searching the web showed the Amiga is capable of formatting double density disk in the PC-format (FAT). First make sure you mounted the disk drive with above command ( mount pc0: ). Then execute:

format drive pc0: name test

Now I could reliably move files from my internet connected PC to my Amiga using 720 kB disks.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by Worfje

So, how to get this WHDLoad on my Amiga?

Looks like you found the cheapest solution

• DOS formatted 720kb PC formatted disks
• Serial cable (USB->9-pin + 9-pin->25-pin adapter) to your PC and AmigaExplorer
• PCI SCSI card to write Amiga SCSI HDD or +cable to create SCSI network
• Gotek floppy disk drive emulator + USBBlaster cable + FlashFloppy firmware + USB Key
• SCSI SD adapter
• SupercardPro / Kryoflux USB->FDC adapter + PC floppy drive to write Amiga disks.
• Zorro USB/Ethernet card

If you can bear the pain of setting up your SCSI network using a PCI SCSI card + cable + siamese software you'll have a super fast way of transferring files to you Amiga 3000

[Worfje]

Being cheap is a way of living here in The Netherlands!

There is one option to add to your list: burn on cdrom and put them in the cdrom drive.

Ok, I installed WHDLoad using the executable/icon Install.
Hmmm, all these installs from the WHDLoad site aren't including the necessary images.
After searching the web, WHDownload popped up. Many complete WHDLoad installs and combined with the good old DownThemAll addon of Firefox... good times.
Battlechess, great! Run it! Missing file?! What the ...? Hmm, looks like a kickROM is missing.

... need to go to bed, more tomorrow!

[alexh]

Games which require kickstart emulation need the ks1.3 Rom and the patch files from skick

There are no disk images included with WHDload or kickstart images because they are not licensed (I.e. illegal) although no one really cares

[Worfje]

You are spot on, that was indeed the case (requiring the skick stuff).

Browsing again the web, I found your solution here.

You can download skick345.lha from Aminet.

From this archive, I only needed to copy below *.PAT and *.RTB files to a new made drawer kickstarts within Devs:

• 39115_ROMKick.PAT
• 39115_ROMKick.RTB
• kick33180.A500.PAT
• kick33180.A500.RTB
• kick34005.A500.PAT
• kick34005.A500.RTB
• kick36143.A3000.PAT
• kick36143.A3000.RTB
• kick37175.A500.RTB

This is not all, you also need to copy original kickROMs, extraced from your own Amiga's or exploit your bought copy of Amiga Forever. I assume the value edition would suffice for most games available via WHDownload.

I recall I had a given copy by Cloanto and it should be somewhere. Connected all my old SATA harddisks from the pre-SSD age and on the last harddisk I found it! Nice. Copyied the appropriate files and renamed them as suggested by WHDLoad page here.

As a last action, you need to copy below files to drawer Devs:

• AllocKick
• AllocKick.doc
• History.doc
• KickStat
• KickStat.doc
• SKick
• SKick.doc
• SKick.info

(corrected by Jope, see below)

Lets see if BattleChess is working now and yes indeed. Nice.
More tomorrow.

[Jope]

You shouldn't need to copy allockick and friends anywhere to get these working in WHDLoad. Only the ROM images and the rtb and pat files.

[Worfje]

You are spot on, thanks.

Finally I had a basic gaming system working.

If you have the luck of having an external disk drive connected to the backside of the Amiga 3000D and you want to read PC-formatted disks on this drive, you need to do the following:

• copy the icon PC0 (or PC1) in drawer WB : Devs/Storage
• rename the created icon Copy_PC0 to PC2
• change icon information on the icon tab to UNIT=2

A random tip: the wildcard on the Amiga is #? and not *.

I wanted to have backups of the hard disk, but how to clone it? CloneZilla does not seem to support Amiga file systems. I found suggestions that cloning on the Amiga is fairly simple, just format other another hard disk and copy the content of the hard disk you want to clone to this other hard disk.

Also, I red that WinUAE can mount the Amiga filesystem perfectly when you connect the hard disk to the PC. I also tried this and was surprised how well this worked. WinUAE can create a hardfile from your connected hard disk, but I still have to try this.

So, I connected other spare hard disks to the Buddha Flash IDE controller, but for some reason the Buddha is very picky if it wants to detect the hard disk correctly. Some attempts went wrong since I did not correctly set the jumpers for single, slave or master. With all hard disks that are connected for the first time to the Buddha Flash or are moved to the other IDE port, you get a message that the location is updated and data needs to be written to the disk. I haven't googled on the reason for this, but I am curious what data it written to the hard disk and why this is needed. Sometimes, I got a return code 20.

It also picked my brain why the Amiga resets during booting into the workbench. Jens explained that this is due to AmigaOS 3.9, which performs a patch on the 3.1 kickROMs. Good to know. It is possible to buy (Amiga model) specific kickROMs which have the AmigaOS 3.9 patches on board and therefore the reset is not needed anymore.

Time for bed.

[quantum8]

As far as I know, you have to roll your own 3.9 Roms.

You could also run 3.1.4 as a lot of things have been updated. No need for the reboot dance.

[Worfje]

What about the 3.X kickROMs that Cloanto offers here?

[indigolemon]

Originally Posted by Worfje

What about the 3.X kickROMs that Cloanto offers here?

You'll find mixed opinions on these, but I consider them the worst option out there.

I went down the 3.1.4 ROM route, and then rolled the updated OS parts into my 3.9 install. See: http://www.indigolemon.co.uk/blog/20...-3-9-to-3-1-4/

[alexh]

One tip about A3000 ROM upgrades... no matter which ones you order you'll almost certainly order the wrong pinout first time. There are two pinouts for A3000 and something called a ROM Tower which switches from one to the other. You really want to get ones which work with your motherboard without a ROM Tower as it gets in the way of other expansions you might want in the future.

[Jope]

If you intend to use the rear sockets U182 and U183, you should order 27C220. If you intend to use the front sockets U180 and U181 or plug the chips into a ROM tower, it is 27C400.

If you want to stop using the tower, you can do this and order 27C220 chips, leave out the tower and plug the chips into U182 and U183 on the motherboard.

If your system shipped with the rom tower, the motherboard U180 and U181 are wired incorrectly and you shouldn't plug any chips in there.