In this video, I take an initial look at the new AA3000+ motherboard replacement for the A3000, comparing it to the original motherboard and checking out the AGA functionality. I also try it out with RTG graphics.
My board was just finished by Hese. Also ordered a A4000TX board. They are works of art. I never had an Amiga back in the 1990's, let alone a big box Amiga. I asked for the custom chips to be socketed due to being NOS but still 20/30 years old. Lets revive the Amiga.
As someone who was pursuing a computer science degree at university at the same time, I was a die-hard Frankenstein Amiga 500 owner. I loved the idea of competition between types (PC, Apple & Amiga alternatives) of computers driving both/all toward better quality at hopefully lower costs. And I still think the Amiga was a superior machine for its time. When I learned that they went belly-up/bankrupt, I was crushed. That then became my 2nd rather bad experience buying into computers in the mid-80s to the mid-90s. The first was when I was a senior in high school, and had a newspaper route -- delivering quite a few newspapers to finally be able to afford a brand new Apple ][gs (I sold my Apple IIe, and added a good amount of cash to upgrade). And I had that thing all of about 10 full days before Apple discontinued it. Two valuable lessons learned by me at significant cost and an impressionable age... 'Better' doesn't always ensure business survival, especially if mismanaged. And even at this later stage of life, I am not sure I could easily afford to own, and keep semi-modern, Apple systems, upgrading every couple/few years or so.
You know, the A4K was supposed to support 8Mb of CHIP RAM, some A4000D motherboards (not sure about the T) actually have a useless jumper supposed to switch from 2Mb max CHIP to 8Mb max CHIP. It is my opinion that FAT Agnus should be replaced by an FPGA that fully implements the 8Mb CHIP support. This would do wonders for AGA GFX and audio.
hi, orginal Amiga owner here, A500, several A2000/video toaster and finally A3000 and A4000. I believe the DSP was intended to be used for audio. Also the "AA" chipset was never produced. The board shown here apparently has the "AGA" chipset which was a cut down version of AA at the time for release in the A4000. Later they would rename AA as "AAA" and continue development, and there was also a prototype of that board that works, I believe in the possession of Dave Haynie who has showed it working in the past... The real AA chipset was originally supposed to ship with the A3000, and it was a true color (24bpp) hires, non interlaced graphics chipset, backwards compatible with the Amiga OCS/ECS, and it was FAST, not like the other true color solutions available at the time (ie Mac II) that were terribly slow. IF they had released the A3000 with the real "AA" it probably would have saved the Amiga.
Everything you just said is wrong. AGA wasn't a cut down version of AA, they are the exact same thing. It was called AGA for marketing purposes only. Your description of a "real AA" actually matches AAA, but you miss out that it's development was very very behind. Haynie expected a 1994 release.
Very Nice! I finished assembling mine last week and have been enjoying it immensely! I am curious to know if you left the scan doubler disabled for the balance of the video or did you re-enable it? I’m still waiting for some field memory to show up so I can use my scan doubler but I’ve been very interested to see if the image quality is as good as Amber...
I turned the scandoubler on at about 20 mins into the video and then left it on after that. The image quality is great - at least as good as Amber IMHO
@@wrangleramiga896 I got mine all finished and it works great too--except for NTSC interlaced modes. Could you do me a favor and test NTSC HiResLaced and NTSC Laced and let me know if it's really blurry? Also, for some reason in several Team17 games like AlienBreed2AGA, whatever screen mode they're using the screen is horizontally "tripled" and overlaying itself. Very strange!
@@wrangleramiga896 Hese helped me with the NTSC issue. Apparently he updated the GAL jedecs for U460 and U461 after initially sharing the build data. So I was using the old jedecs that didn't work with NTSC. Updating fixed that, but unfortunately AB2 still has the weird wrapped around effect. Really curious to hear how yours handles AB2...
Nice review! I have my board here but need to send it back to hese for assembly. Quick question (maybe I missed it) but why does WhichAmiga say it's running on a 68060? Did you put an A3660 in?
I have been a massive Amiga fan since buying my first A500 in 1988. I never heard about this board until today. What an amazing machine this would have been also considering the potential uses of the DSP chip. How many blank boards were discovered?
Apparently, a couple of the guys on A1k.org got hold of 5 AA3000 rev 2 boards, populated them and got them working. But I don't know if Hese's replica board is directly based off them or not. And: as far as I can work out, the A3000+ came first and had a chip called Gary+ which reset the DSP properly. The AA3000 incorporated this logic into PALs and used a regular Gary chip. So the replica is closer to the AA3000 design than the A3000+, it would appear.
What type of memory modules does the AA3000+ use? I heard 2 SIMM modules are supported. I think 16MB is max. But, what type of memory modules are they? How many pins? What speed? Etc…
Yes, 2 SIMM modules max, 72 pin type. 70ns should be fine. I don't recall the max size but probably no bigger than 16MB, and I don't know about EDO. I just used a SIMM from an A4000 to give me some fastram although I'm really relying on ram on the accelerator as it's so much faster.
Probably best to ask hese on his Amibay sales thread for the AA3000+ if he'd build one for you and at what cost. You would need to supply all the components, including the custom chips which are now difficult/expensive to find.
@@wrangleramiga896 Well, I have still 4 Amiga 500s in my basement from when they came out, and no it's not a problem with a dodgy chip. It's a well known issue. That's why they said to back up all your disks and use copies instead of using the original disks. I have a Commodore 128 and a VIC-20 too and they didn't have the issue, just AMIGA. My workbench disks and all my programs all eventually got 'bad cylinders' even though I only used my original disks to make copies. When the computer ruined my Disney cartoon studio which was a program I paid a lot of money for I was done. I'm shocked that you haven't heard of this, since Commodore themselves said you have to to back up your disks. Garbo computer system
Did you ever het PCI/PPC going on the Prometheus? I have to running an my A4000D/Mediator and it and of rocks....apart from the lack of PPC software. I was away from Amiga scene for 10+ years and there nothing new for ClassicPPC in terms of software to run......tough it as interesting to get my old Amiga titles installed and working :-/
Yeah, (some) PCI PPC cards work on the Prometheus. See my videos on that. And there has been loads of new Amiga PPC software in the last 10 years eg Cowcat's conversions of Quake 1/2/3, Diablo and others, and my own conversions of Stratagus (Warcraft 2) and Duke Nukem...
Wrangler, you’re such a bad influence. I just dropped a ton of money on one of these boards, fully assembled by Hese, all because of this series of videos from you!
That clear plastic and bubble wrap can generate over 3,000 volts of static electricity. So, those boards are probably zapped. They should have been placed in silver or black anti-static bags.
If I knew how to make a version of the 3000... I'd stick a 68060 and a PPC on instead of an 030 and 882... I mean .. why not? Also... those old serial mouse/joystick ports would give way to USB 2.0 (at least).. so u can use a gamepad and USB mouse. the serial port on the back would go to.. room for an ethernet jack and another USB port or two.. or four.. I figure.. with the cpu situation it's not like you will have a major compatibility issue if you up'd it to 060 and ppc Same as if you got one of those blizzard 060's with ppc.. ya just shove it straight onto the board and replace the 030/882 with it. the cpu slot could then be used to add even more RAM maybe (as long as you figure out a way to max it past the boards (earlier) limit of 16mb RAM. If that can't be done because of the older limitation.. then a jumper disable the onboard fast THEN the expansion board could be 128mb or beyond because it would be on the CPU's bus directly. As for the Graphics/System RAM I still wonder if that can't be bumped up to 4 to 8mb at least. Not sure if it would work.. but could you run two Alice chips ( that is the graphics chip right? I may have forgot). I'd go all out to push the boundaries of the Amiga in a mobo redesign.... There would also be a SSD port for those faster SSD stick drives... that would be awesome. Parallel port would go to.. more USB... so then you could use USB printers/scanners and whatever. I mean ... pimp it up bigtime. Might as well. Then you got all those card slots... to put even more stuff later. Amiga COULD make a comeback... they flat out need to make an AMIGA GRAPHICS Card (for all pc's) and compete directly with NVDIA and AMD... This would be a huge money maker.. but they got to make one that is damn good and uses their own chipset to be unique. Amiga Graphics card PCIE for all PC's (and even Amigas that have a PCIE slot-- via daughterboard replacement). Maybe later.. an Amiga Gaming console to compete with XBOX, Playstation. Those two products alone.. would bring amiga back to the forefront. Then.... as they gain money.. they can play around with the hobby end of Amigas and slowly bring them up to speed This way they can learn new things as they develop ... and without spending a fortune to do so. All the while maintaining the GFX card and gaming console as the ca$h makers.
No, I don't believe enough is known about any of them to recreate them even if financially it made sense. This has meant though that the prices of spare original custom chips have rocketed.
@@wrangleramiga896 HP Fabbed many of the later chips and would still have the schematics on file. But yeah, it would be a fortune to do a small fab run of complete sets. Though I thought they did 100% accurate recreations in FPGA with minimig?
5mins of blablabla until the interresting part starts. Pls concentrate on the interresting facts, that would help. From there, a very good video! Thank you!
That board appears to be all surface mount crap. I like the original Amiga 3000 motherboard better because it is the higher quality Thru-Hole technology. But, no other Amiga model beats the Amiga 2000 and 500 as far as design and quality. Why do you think they were Commodore's number one selling and most popular Amiga models. Also, you have to remember that over 90% of all Amiga software runs the best on the OCS and Kickstart / Workbench 1.3. The Amiga 1200 and 4000 computers (AGA chip set) are actually Amiga Clones. They are NOT true Amiga computers, like the Amiga 1000, 2000, and 500. Commodore got the idea to produce Amiga clones from Apple Computers, because they were doing the same thing with their Macintosh line. SMT boards are low quality and much cheaper to produce than Thru-Hole boards. They also have a much higher profit margin. Why do you think Commodore killed the Amiga 2000 and 500 computers in order to force people to buy the new Amiga 600, 1200, and 4000 pieces of garbage. SMT Amiga boards, no thank you. Let me know when there are new Thru-Hole Amiga boards. Then I will consider buying them.
