ReAmiga 3000 motherboard is fully built and tested

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ReAmiga 1.4 motherboardboard

I had an old Amiga 3000 in my stash that I got in a trade years ago. It was traded to me as fully working but never worked no matter what I did. When the ReAmiga 3000 project became known I wanted to save the broken A3000 by building up a ReAmiga 3000 motherboard with the parts from the broken Amiga 3000.

I did not have the soldering skills 15 years ago to do that, but today is a different time (and maybe I was better off 15 years ago with just one A1200 instead of a fleet of Amiga replicas) – So the broken Amiga 3000, or at least what was left of it has gotten a new lease on its life!

Find out more about the ReAmiga project here.

I have already started soldering in stuff that I should have waited with, as usual it is difficult to wait for the right parts to arrive at the post office before starting the project properly.

So this is how it started out. This time I started off with a motherboard with all passives already mounted which saved a ton of time. Interestingly though, I found one error where the BOM specified a tantal capacitor and a regular ceramic cap was placed instead. It was an easy fix!

Here is the original Amiga 3000 motherboard which acted as a donor card

The components I used from my broken Amiga 3000 was the full chipset (more on that later), the special memory chips for the scandoubler and some odd pieces here and there such as the trim pot, power socket, disable switch for the scandoubler and the stacked female 25 pin port.

I usually like to keep some parts from donor Amigas in new builds not just the custom chips.

Believe it or not, I actually used the same KEL connector for the CPU board that was mounted on the broken A3000, it was a painful experience desoldering it.

I also wanted to save the two edge card connectors for the daughterboard, desoldering them was a major hassle since the ground plane is very strong on the A3000, instead I ordered replacements from AliExpress.

Chipset gave me a surprise

As is derigeur when building an Amiga replica, there are always some kind of surprise no matter how much prepping one does.

So there are some very expensive chips on the Amiga 3000. First is the Amber chip which is part of the scandoubler/flickerfixer. Then there is the DMAC chip both which costs a ton of money.

I did not know if these where working before starting the build and I was not prepared to pay 200-250+ euros for replacements if they did not work. Luckily I could confirm they where working once the motherboard was fully built. But surprised I was, the Ramsey chip was broken. Luckily I had a NOS Ramsey 07 chip in my stash and as lucky as I was a Buster 11 was offered for sale on a local website meaning I could skip the Buster 7 I had from the broken A3000.

Lets find out if Ramsey 07 plays well with my revision 02 of the Super DMAC. I will just have to find out once system is fully up and running with Workbench installed. If not I will need to track down a Super DMAC replica.

Next steps….

Now all I am waiting for is a replica A3000D case to be available and I will order one in black ASAP. I am also doing a daughter board for it which I will post about later in the year here.