Amiga 3000 with Fastlane Z3

[jrobbins70]

Hi all.

New to the forums.

I have tried without any success to get my amiga 3000 with buster 11 to work with the Fastlane Z3 scsi controller (even with v8.5 rom). It always hangs, random crashes, r/w errors. Hard disk or DAT drive; does not work reliably. I have proper termination and cabling.

It does, however, work as a ram expander no problem.

I have a stock amiga 3000 25mhz with 16 megs fast ram, 2 chip. Nothing special. No other cards installed. 7.3G scsi drive attached to the motherboard scsi working fine.

Any thoughts on what could be the trouble or is this a known problem which cannot be resolved?

Thank you.

J

[grelbfarlk]

I guess by proper termination you mean you have active termination and known good cables for SCSI-II Fast.
You could try different unitcontrol settings to see if you can make it more stable. Also try the utility for forcing DMA mode.
The Fastlane was a little picky about what slots it worked in correctly.

[jrobbins70]

Yes, I have active termination and good cables. I have tried every setting with unitcontrol. I've tried every slot as well.

I wish I could find someone who has a working Z3 in an amiga 3000.

It can work for a few minutes before throwing errors. It is really fast before it flakes out.

J

[grelbfarlk]

Have you tried any other Z3 cards?

[jrobbins70]

Do you mean other Zorro 3 cards or Fastlane Z3 cards? I only have one fastlane but I do have a Picasso 2 graphics card which works fine but I took it out to test the Fastlane. No dice.

J

[grelbfarlk]

I meant other Zorro 3 cards. The Picasso 2 is a Zorro 2 card. Reason I ask is that you could have problems with the Zorro 3 logic that wouldn't be present with some Zorro 2 cards.
Have you thoroughly tested the Fastlane RAM? As in force it to the highest priority and run some large programs or copy some data into RAM and copy it back and verify?

[jrobbins70]

Hi again.

Yes, I have used a ram tester moving the z3's ram to the highest priority and beat on it for hours. No errors.

I've also moved big files to and from it without any issue.

I'm starting to think that the Z3 is to blame and not the a3000. I wish I had another zorro 3 machine to test with.

J

[jrobbins70]

The ram tester I used was from 1991. Maybe someone could recommend the name of a more modern ram tester? The one I used was also in German which I do not comprehend.

J

[grelbfarlk]

In that case it's probably fine. I recall there being a couple electrolytic caps on the Fastlane or at least one by the SCSI port. It could very well be that there is something slightly off with the SCSI portion of the Fastlane.
Does it work briefly after a reboot and then starts to throw errors, or do you have to shut the machine off before you get another couple minutes of it working?

[jrobbins70]

It'll work briefly after each reboot. I never need to power off the machine to get it working again, but it works for maybe a minute.

I have KS/Wb 3.1.4 and use HDToolbox with it set to the fastlane scsi driver. Does HDToolbox work properly with the Fastlane? Or do I need to use the fastlane setup program?

J

[grelbfarlk]

Use HDToolbox, at least that's what I use with WB3.9, I can't imagine it would be different for 3.1.4.
There should be a utility on the Fastlane disk called CheckMask to see if you set the Mask setting correctly, but that's probably not your culprit.

[jrobbins70]

Do you have a fastlane Z3 with an amiga 3000?

J

[jrobbins70]

I'd like to revise my answer: the Fastlane works for about 2 minutes and then throws errors. Soft reboots does NOT fix it. It comes back with errors right away. If I power the machine off for a minute and then boot, it's working fine for another 2 minutes.

Caps?

J

[grelbfarlk]

Originally Posted by jrobbins70

I'd like to revise my answer: the Fastlane works for about 2 minutes and then throws errors. Soft reboots does NOT fix it. It comes back with errors right away. If I power the machine off for a minute and then boot, it's working fine for another 2 minutes.

Caps?

J

That's kind of the behavior I'd suspect with caps, but it could still be any other problem honestly.

I have A4000s, no A3000s. As I understand it, DMAC and Ramsey versions don't matter with Buster 11, but you might want to verify this.

On the same note your 20 year old sockets might be oxidized a bit or any other component like the PAL logic for the Zorro slights might be doing the same. Not saying that is the case here, but testing in another machine that definitely works with Zorro 3 DMA cards is probably the easiest thing-which might be totally impractical for you to do.

[jrobbins70]

I looked and the caps on the fastlane and they are 3x 100uf 10v, so easy to source. I shall change them and advise of my progress.

If that fails, I'm not against recapping the entire motherboard and card adapter. Everything is all original so it won't hurt either way.

J

[jrobbins70]

I recapped the Fastlane and there was no improvement. No worse but no better.

J

[B2k_ad]

HI
You may want to monitor your PSU .... or lets say the voltage arriving at your scsi drive.
Did you test another SCSI Drive? maybe i did not catch that.
And last but not least I think the fastlane does DMA in to its RAM so you may need to look for your bus signals i.e.
the pull up resistors for your data and adress lines.
Sounds like a noisy signal.
But you are not the only one having massive trouble with the fastlane.

Sorry if my text is messed
My A 2000 still does a bad Job on formatting the text in EAB correctly

[jrobbins70]

Thanks B2k_ad

I have a scsitoSD card which is powered by numerous ways (50 pin cable power, molex and usb, tried them all). I also tried a real SCSI drive 73G with molex.

The fastlane ram passes all ram tests and works fine as a ram expander. I set the mem priority of the fastlane to 40.

If you know of someone else having trouble with the fastlane, perhaps you could get them to send me a PM or post here?

J

[amigasith]

Hi jrobbins70,

although I don't have an A3000 but an A4000, I have a long troubleshooting history with this card... While my issues were more substantial - Guru's, RAM and / or SCSI part not being recognized in early startup menu, etc. - your issues more sound like SCSI issues to me.

Have you checked the following:

- Do you have the termination resistor packs installed on the Fastlane? You need 3 special through-hole resistor networks installed close to the internal 50-pin SCSI connector. They're not simple single value resistor networks, but special SCSI resistor networks with a combination of 220/330 Ohms.

- If you don't have those internal resistor packs installed, I guess an external terminator connected to the external SCSI port should also work.

- Do you have termination power enabled on the Fastlane? There is a jumper close to the external SCSI connector that enables termpower. If your SCSI devices also have a termpower jumper, try with enabling termpower on one of your SCSI devices.

In addition, you can do the following:

- Depending on the revision of your Fastlane, you have one or more socketed ICs on the card. Try to re-seat them, since sometimes those old sockets are causing connection issues. Be VERY careful when removing the ICs, however, since the plastic is old and brittle and can easily brake if you apply too much force.

The final solution for getting my card stable was to "under-power" the Amiga. I found an old PSU that has a small rotary potentiometer that allows to adjust the 5V line. If I go slightly below spec - meaning 4.8 Volts - everything runs super-stable across hours and hours.

If I adjust it to run at 5V or use a PSU that doesn't allow adjusting the 5V line, I sometimes get the problems I described initially: Guru's, RAM and / or SCSI part not being recognized in early startup menu, error requesters from the PFS3 filesystem, etc. Thankfully, everything else in the A4000 still works fine at 4.8 Volts.

Cheers,
Marc

[B2k_ad]

Originally Posted by amigasith

Hi jrobbins70,


The final solution for getting my card stable was to "under-power" the Amiga. I found an old PSU that has a small rotary potentiometer that allows to adjust the 5V line. If I go slightly below spec - meaning 4.8 Volts - everything runs super-stable across hours and hours.

If I adjust it to run at 5V or use a PSU that doesn't allow adjusting the 5V line, I sometimes get the problems I described initially: Guru's, RAM and / or SCSI part not being recognized in early startup menu, error requesters from the PFS3 filesystem, etc. Thankfully, everything else in the A4000 still works fine at 4.8 Volts.

Thats my guessing as well.
If the fastlane does DMA and takes over the Zorro bus there would be Problems if the bus drivers on the card are not beefy enough to pull the data and adress lines low.


Lowering the voltage of the 5Volt rail is one solution.
The other would be connecting an (maybe old) Oscilloscope and checking if the low state of any given line really is low and not something around 1.8 Volts.
I think with cmos you are looking somewhere like low=0-1.5volts hi=3.5-5volts
but you have to check this on wiki.
Anything between is undefined.

That could also happen the other way round if your pullup resistors for your zorro bus are actually increasing resistance by becoming hot.
Anyway theese are only guessings maybe i am totally wrong.