The Amiga entered our house around 1988 if I remember correctly. My father bought it, it was an A2000 "revision B" with 512K chip, 512K fast running 1.3 and cost an outrageous amount of money for our family. The Amiga was very big here in the Netherlands, lots of people had one and I had many friends with A500's (if they could afford one). I have very fond memories of many, many evenings spent getting to know the Amiga, and our A2000 in particular, learning the OS etc. We started with buying and trading Fred Fish disks, bought some software and games and got started on programming. I remember many evenings (and short nights) lost on AmigaBASIC... we actually got a working version of the game "Reversi", complete with double buffering and sprites. To me, those are very, very fond memories and one of the reasons I got back to the Amiga. Just whenever I'm playing with them - that feeling of those days comes back to me. Even when I'm just moving files around or changing icons.
Then in 1990-something the Amiga 3000 was launched. We lived in the USA at that time (running our PAL A2000 on a 220V-110V transformer)... I just loved it and dreamed of ever owning one. There was a store that I would linger at that had one on display (touching not allowed). Gorgeous. And it had everything our A2000 did not have (such as a 68030 CPU, flicker-fixer, etc.).
I have always found the A3000 "D" the most attractive Amiga ever made, even after leaving the Amiga behind (and jumping on a wagon that evolved into Linux). So when I could buy a second hand Amiga 3000 "D" last year I immediately said "yes"!
It was in bad shape. Some weird previous owner had painted the external case with white paint. The motherboard is an 7.0 revision (pre-second production run), and it is a 25MHz version... The battery was already slightly leaking so before ever turning it on I was already taking it apart and cutting the battery out. The A3000 needed to wait until my A4000 project was finished... In the meantime I soldered a Li-Ion clock battery in, found a newer revision SCSI chip for a few euro's and got another A3000 case from a nice guy on this forum. Also, from a Dutch webshop I got a refurbished Seagate 50pin SCSI HD and put in my Ariadne2 network card. I also fitted a silent slot-ventilator which I got for €2 from Ebay to get some more airflow in that tight space. Also found a SuperBuster-11 at Vesalia early this year...
Two nights ago I started putting everything back together, and it actually works! The audio is still bust, but it runs...
So now I have an,
Amiga 3000, revision 7.2
DMAC-02, Ramsey-04, SuperBuster-11
2MB Chip and 4MB ZIP memory
3.1 ROMs
working floppy drive (LED was broken, fixed)
working power and HD LEDs (HD LED was broken, swapped with other A3000D LED unit from spare case)
Seagate 2GB SCSI drive
Ariadne_II Zorro II network card
It runs great and I'm trying to copy my install files that I made on the A4000 over to this nice machine... some pictures (I have some more while working on it...),
I'll just love every minute of using it! Just wanted to share my enthusiasm on this nostalgic piece of hardware... Any other users here with a soft spot for the 3000?
BTW. I still have the A2000... it's in storage about 4 feet from where I'm sitting, but the motherboard is severely damaged from the battery acid - we just didn't know until about two years ago (when it was already to late).
