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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Fri Dec 13, 2019 11:35 am

As a means of insurance (aka feeding my obsessive paranoia) when it comes to precious Commodore hardware I typically like to try and get two of everything.

As an example I have not only one Amiga 3000, but 2 Amiga 3000's. I do this across nearly every C= product line I own. My thinking here is if something blows up or dies a slow and tragic death I'll have a backup. And in a couple of real-life cases having backups has indeed come in handy and saved my butt.

And before anyone says I'm being over the top, the A3000 in particular is legendary for suffering horrible fates due to the location of the factory-installed battery, which was soldered right onto the motherboard next to some very sensitive components, particularly video.

I've not seen very many A3000's that don't have at least a bit of corrosion around the battery area. Both of my machines - in all reality - visually look very good and after removing their batteries I cleaned the affected areas thoroughly. But we all know it's what we can't see that might get us in the end. All it takes is one grain of acidic dust that I might have missed...

So, I picked up a brand new motherboard replacement. Isn't it amazing how these are being produced 29 years after the first A3000 hit store shelves in 1990?
IMG_5363.jpg
Behold this gorgeous fiberglass and copper sea of blue.

John "Chucky" Hertell created (iirc) 100 prints of brand-new A3000 motherboards that he reverse engineered himself.

His project is called the ReAmiga 3000, and he actually created three variations for brand new Amiga 3000 motherboards.

One is called the ReAmiga 3000TH. That's the one I got. It's nearly a clone of the original motherboard with a few key differences. The main change is the entire thing can be soldered via passive "through-hole," which is the easiest form of soldering out there. The only other difference is that it uses 8MB SIMM sockets for the RAM rather than all of the old, antiquated zip and dip RAM. So there are places for two sockets so you can do one stick of 8MB or two sticks of 16MB.

There are a few other changes:
  • Removed the ROM-Tower section of the roms and only have the 27C400 compatible roms to avoid confusion. I added a possibility to use 27C800 proms and by that you can have a Kickstart switch that also is available on the PCB.
  • Added possibility of having both DIN and PS/2 Style keyboard connectors. STILL ONLY AMIGA!! (so A3000/4000 style NOT PC!)
  • Varta battery removed, now only NON RECHARGEABLE CR2032 batteries is supported.
  • Added possibility of a separate oscillator for the FPU, Jumper close to CPU selects if CPU or External clock is to be used.
IMG_5364.jpg
Chucky is Legend.

The other two options provide either a near-perfect clone of an original board, or a modernization of the original board. Chucky goes into the reasoning around this whole project here.

They all require a lot of effort, patience and time to produce. But more than anything, I think, they provide a bit of psychological peace of mind. And some of us here at AmigaLove certainly have the chops to do this. I like to think that one day I might, too.

Incidentally, Chucky also made an ReAmiga 1200.

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qbarnes

Posted Fri Dec 13, 2019 7:12 pm

"So there are places for two sockets so you can do one stick of 8MB or two sticks of 16MB."

Do you have the numbers swapped? In other words, one stick of 16MB or two sticks of 8MB?

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:44 am

Do you have the numbers swapped? In other words, one stick of 16MB or two sticks of 8MB?
No, according to Chucky only 8MB SIMMs are allowed. So you can either populate 1 for 8, or 2 for 16.

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grshaw

Posted Tue Dec 17, 2019 9:23 am

It is indeed an awesome project. Do you intend to populate the board ready to use if needed. For example, passive components, sockets, connectors etc. Or will you wait to see if one of your motherboards fails before embarking down that road?

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A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Tue Dec 17, 2019 3:27 pm

looks like alot of practice with the solder gun for that nice new A3000 MB :D have fun & don't forget to post progress pics here <3

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qbarnes

Posted Sat Dec 21, 2019 1:43 pm

intric8 wrote:
Mon Dec 16, 2019 9:44 am
Do you have the numbers swapped? In other words, one stick of 16MB or two sticks of 8MB?
No, according to Chucky only 8MB SIMMs are allowed. So you can either populate 1 for 8, or 2 for 16.
Thank you. Your use of "for" makes sense to me now. Must be a difference of interpretation of prepositions. Maybe American vs. International English? If it had been written as, "... you can do one stick for 8MB or two sticks for 16MB", that would have been clear to me.

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intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sat Dec 21, 2019 1:48 pm

Oh I see. I'm sorry if I caused any confusion. I probably should have used "with" instead. Glad that's all sorted out.

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iljitsch

Posted Sat Jan 15, 2022 8:34 am

intric8 wrote:
Fri Dec 13, 2019 11:35 am
I've not seen very many A3000's that don't have at least a bit of corrosion around the battery area. Both of my machines - in all reality - visually look very good and after removing their batteries I cleaned the affected areas thoroughly.
So the batteries had leaked on both your 3000s?

Actually the 500 MB (oops, typed GB there, but it's really only 0.5 of those!) SCSI drive in my Amiga 3000 finally stopped working. I installed a Buddha IDE card last year so I didn't really need that drive anymore, but now it kept the computer from starting up. So I opened her up to disconnect the drive.

And while I was at it, I removed the battery. Still perfectly fine as far as I can see, though:
IMG_5073.JPG
This is a 3000 I've had for 30 years, 4 of which were in storage. But it only held a charge for about a week, anyway. I did get a CR2232 holder as a replacement, but I don't really feel comfortable taking the soldering iron to the motherboard. And a sync with an NTP server at startup takes care of setting the date anyway.





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