User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Sun Jan 23, 2022 11:37 am

I took one of my Amiga 3000's apart this weekend so I could install my newly acquired Cyberstorm MK2 accelerator. To do so requires you remove the PSU and drive sled/bracket. The accelerator gets plugged into the front edge of the motherboard below all of the drives.
IMG_6557.jpg

The clearance is minimal!
IMG_6669.jpg
If the card plays nice with the internal SCSI and stays in this machine, I'll probably want to get a small fan to help push the air around down here.


The A3000 it went into never had an accelerator in it before. As a result, the default jumper positions on the motherboard were left untouched. I manually moved over the 060 libraries and plugged the card it. It fired right up!

Of course the first order of business is to get the size comparisons over with, you know what I mean?
IMG_6670.jpg
Needless to say, this machine is the fastest Amiga I've ever owned.

Here are its current stats:
  • Cyberstorm MK2 060@50
  • ZZ9000 @ native 1024x768 on a 4:3 new LCD (crisp as a razor)
  • 2mb chip, 256MB BigRAM, 8mb zips, 24MB on the CS = 290
  • SCSI2SD

To-Dos:
  • Try to ensure the SCSI is stable with this new setup. Some folks have had very sketchy results until the find the magical mix.
  • Assuming I don't have read/write issues, invest in 4 32MB SIMMS, and remove the BigRAM board. It can go in my other A3000 (which is currently being repaired in Canada - massive battery damage that emerged years after its initial cleaning).
  • Stop fiddling and simply enjoy the machine!
Look how fast this machine boots with a background image! It's really impressive.


User avatar
JoeUser
Dallas, TX

Posted Mon Jan 24, 2022 11:19 am

Nice!

If you haven't already thought of it, I'd recommend taping some non-conductive material to the bottom of that drive tray (just in case).

I'm sure you'll come up with some kind of cooling alternative for the CPU. There are tons of alternatives for heat sink and fans for PC enthusiasts that overclock their systems. Perhaps one of those might work.

User avatar
McTrinsic

Posted Mon Jan 24, 2022 1:00 pm

EBay has for quite some time now heatpipe systems from notebooks. Might fancy those.
Last edited by McTrinsic on Tue Jan 25, 2022 3:36 am, edited 1 time in total.

User avatar
obitus1990
USA

Posted Mon Jan 24, 2022 7:20 pm

Funny how the LCD doesn't sync quickly enough to show the flashing rainbow pattern on the screen that these cards (as well as the Blizzard 2060 and 1260) display when booting.

User avatar
intric8
Seattle, WA, USA

Posted Tue Jan 25, 2022 8:59 am

UPDATE

Due to several folks telling me the internal SCSI doesn't always play nice with the Cyberstorm MK2, I knew I needed to bang on the hard drive and see if I could reveal any corruption.

After talking it over with site member and friend Crispy, he taught me how to perform a very interesting "stress test" on the SD-based storage.

First, I backed up the SD card on my Mac - which doesn’t recognize the card by default when you plug it in. I'll explain how he taught me to do this in a different post. This way if anything goes wrong we can restore to my last known good image.

Next, he had me open up 3 separate Shell windows on the Amiga. The idea was to copy three fairly good-sized chunks from one partition over to another partition - all at the same time - and then check for errors. So, we copied Workbench (DH0) over to Work (DH1) concurrently.

The commands look like this:
shell 1: copy DH0:#? DH1:DH0.1 all clone
shell 2: copy DH0:#? DH1:DH0.2 all clone
shell 3: copy DH0:#? DH1:DH0.3 all clone

So I set up the command in 3 Shells then quickly engaged each.

(Note: the garbled text in the video is not how it actually looks in real life; it’s a combination of the video being compressed down to a very lossy state, how that 2-clip video blended and very thin text - it looked great before it was produced by iMovie).


Beyond being a really interesting exercise, it's pretty fun to watch.

Results: No corruption was generated during the stress test. Knock on wood, I think my setup lucked out and everything is absolutely fine.

User avatar
A10001986
1986

Posted Thu Jan 27, 2022 2:09 am

Good test. Let it run for 1+ hr, if that works without corruption you have

1) a good chance the combination works,

2) an SD card which I would not use for anything important in the future. ;)

User avatar
A1-X1000
Toronto, Canada

Posted Sat Jan 29, 2022 8:27 pm

@intric8

Congrats and welcome to the Cyberstorm club! I love my CS-MKIII to Amiga bits in my Amiga 4000 :boing: <3 :commodore:

User avatar
trixster

Posted Wed Feb 16, 2022 10:50 am

Nice accelerator! I used to have one in my 3000 too, it's a good fit assuming youre happy to make do without the SCSI addon. I had zero issues with the CSMk2 in my 3000, it seemed bullet-proof with a few different combinations of DMAC and ramsey, and was happy with the Deneb as well.





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