Amiga 3000

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Don't Panic. Please wash hands.
  • Hello,


    I've been battling issues with a Amiga 3000 desktop that I installed a A3660. After many attempts to load 3.1.4/BestWB/MMULIB on it with a scsi2sd adapter, I gave up and tried the Buddha IDE. (There's a few issues with timing with a 3000/A3660 due to the dmac/ramsey/scsi chip as I've learned) Thankfully it seems the system works with the Buddha IDE now and no longer corrupts the hard drive. I am searching for a little more speed out of the setup though. Currently I only see 1.5mb from the drive. From the literature it would seem I should be able to double this speed. Is there anything I can try tweaking or changing on my setup?


    Amiga 3000 Desktop

    16mb ram/2mb chip

    A3660 V1.0 (68060)

    Buddha IDE 20th anniversary edition

    IDE to SD adapter with microcenter 64gb SD card. (Class 10)

    Block size set to 4096, 30 buffers

  • Is there anything I can try tweaking or changing on my setup?

    Not without re-designing the accelerator. First of all, it would require local RAM to really run fast (right now it's basically waiting for memory, no matter what it does), and the bus interface is the slow implementation that Motorola has suggested back in the days. It was never designed for performance, but for demonstrating how you can operate a 68040 in a 68030 environment. There are lots of places where extra cycles are wasted for simplicity.


    What you can try is a CF card adapter. If the software finds that it's talking to a CF card, different inner transfer routines will be used that take advantage of some knowledge we gained from the ACA500plus. There's a small chance that the SD-card adapter you're using does not identify as "not a harddrive" like CF cards mostly do, so you're stuck in the harddrive-optimized transfer routines. I wouldn't expect more than 100-200k/s difference in performance, tough.

  • When you say "software", are you talking about the firmware on the Buddha? I ask because I didn't use the DOM to install. Is there anything else I need to install for the Buddha on the workbench side?

  • I went back into HDtoolbox because I remembered something about CF when I mounted them. It sees the drive as a FC-1307 SD to CF Adapter.

    I was just hoping that this could get closer to the ~3mb limit of the zorro bus.

  • When you say "software", are you talking about the firmware on the Buddha?

    Yes.


    I ask because I didn't use the DOM to install.

    There is a flash rom on the card that contains the drivers. These are always loaded, no matter if you're using the the DOM or not.

    Is there anything else I need to install for the Buddha on the workbench side?

    No. It's auto-config, so you don't need to worry about driver isntallation. It all happens automatically.


    I was just hoping that this could get closer to the ~3mb limit of the zorro bus.

    Z2 may have a 3.5MB/s theoretical limit, but since you also need time to move the data to a destination (or from a source in case of a write), you will never reach this limit. The maximum you may see with a fast 68030 accelerator is 2.5MB/s.


    Once again, the bottleneck is your accelerator, which wastes a lot of time in the inefficient bus interface - and this happens for both RAM accesses and peripheral accesses. You're running with the handbrake engaged. No need to tweak aerodynamics if you're not even reaching bicycle speeds.

  • Would the CF adapter path be of any use?

    It's an experiment worth trying, because these adapters are well under 10 dollars shipped, and CF cards are widely available. Like I wrote, I don't expect a huge impact, but something that may be worth 100-200k/s.

  • The last reply was more than 365 days ago, this thread is most likely obsolete. It is recommended to create a new thread instead.