| From: | Nick Lamburn |
| Date: | 31 May 2000 at 21:02:36 |
| Subject: | Amiga 3000s - Don't you just Love them? |
Hello All,
Well, I'm on another spending spree, well at least in my head I am, and my
parents don't know yet, but I've managed to make an excuse for each upgrade
since 1996 (when i bough my first two expansions, a 1Mb A500+ upgrade and a
Floppy Disk drive ;), so I reckons that I can do it again. Now, I shall
deffinitely be getting a BVision this year and the ZIV expansion to go with
that and they'll go in my A1200T.
Now; I also have a A1200; which is a nice machine, an 030/50/882 - 16Mb -
520Mb hard disk - SCSI and CD-ROM, which is nice enough. But apart from my
A2500 (which was never mine anyway! :), I have finally sucumbed to something
I have dearly wanted since this time of year in 1990. I may only have been
eight but my age never distracted me, even the lauch of the less sexy (who
unscrewed his screws! :) A4000. So what in God's name am I on about here?
It's the one, and only.....
.....Amiga 3000!
These Amigas, despite their age, are a seriously nice piece of kit in my
opinion; and puts the A4000 to shame, give or take the lack of a (albeit
small in the A4000D) 5.25" internal bay, I still really really like the
A3000. As you can imagine, £3K was too much for me at eight way back in
July 1990. So why did I want one of these even though I was eight? Well,
it looked damned good (still does) and now, I want one! But for all my
love of this finely tuned machine, I have a few (!) questions about it:
1. What is the max. SCSI speed on its built in controller?
2. Can I plug my SVGA monitor straight into its port at the back for
such monitors; ie: is it a high density 15pin connector or the older
VGA 9pin one?
3. It has a flicker fixer which is dead nice, does that also mean it's
scan doubled to 31KHz or both 15 and 31KHz?
4. Is flicker fixed output to the VGA/SVGA socket only or both Amiga
RGB as well?
5. Being a developer I now know quite a bit about the A3000s OS saga, well
I thought it was a bit of a mess myself but still. Anyway - when I
buy an A3000, is it likely that it'll use SuperKickstart or a ROM?
Are any A3000s supplied with a Kickstart chip older than v36.xx?
Do most A3000s have Kickstart/Workbench v37.xx (37.175?) or do a
fair few have v36.xx?
How many A3000s use a 'tower' for the ROMs? Are 'tower' ROM
replacements more tricky than normal motherboard socketed ROMs?
7. Am I more likely to get a Buster rev. 6 than rev. 7? What's the max.
speed of Buster rev. 7?
8. What time did Commodore start fitting high density floppies to these
wonderful machines? 1991?
9. Are all A3000 mice that 'pregnant' style one, or are they the older
clunky A1000 one. (These questions are getting stupid :)
10. Are there any 68030 accelerators for the A3000? Or are they all
040/060+ since the A3000 is already 68030 based?
11. Do all A3000 have a 16MHz 68881 FPU or 25MHz 68882 FPU?
12. What are most common? 16MHz/030/881 or 25MHz/030/882 A3000s?
13. What is the average size Hard Disk you get with an A3000 (meaning what
did Commodore ship with the A3000 mostly)
14. Are all A4000 CPU cards A3000 compatible, say if it had KS 3.1 the A3K?
I say this because physically they share the same CPU connector.
15. How much RAM did CBM ship A3000s with? I heard 1Mb Chip + 1Mb Fast.
And last, but by no means the least of these questions: How much is just the
A3000 unit likely to cost me these days? And can you buy them s/h from
refurbished centres and that, or is it the small ads? :)
/me just gagging for an A3000! :)
All the best,
Nick 'A3000 Mad' Lamburn.
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