Technical Information
The Amiga 3000 shipped with a Motorola 68030 at either 16 or 25 MHz and 2 MB of RAM. It includes the Enhanced Chip Set and a "display enhancer" for use with a VGA monitor and a DMA SCSI-II controller and hard disk drive.
"Fast RAM" can be increased by fitting ZIP DRAM chips available in two varieties, Page Mode or Static Column.
The A3000, unlike most Amiga models, supports both ROM-based Kickstarts and disk-based Kickstarts (the early "SuperKickstart" model), although not simultaneously. Kickstart V1.4 is actually a beta version of Kickstart which is loaded from disk. 68040 microprocessors require at least 2.0 ROMs.
The A3000 has a number of Amiga compatible connectors including two DE-9 ports for joysticks, mice, and light pens, a standard 25-pin RS-232 serial port and a 25-pin Centronics parallel port. As a result, at launch the A3000 was compatible with many existing Amiga peripherals, such as, MIDI interfaces, serial modems and sound samplers.
The A3000 has four internal 32-bit Zorro III expansion slots. This expansion bus allows the use of devices which comply with the AutoConfig standard, such as, graphic cards, audio cards, network cards and later even USB controllers.
The two ISA slots can be activated by use of a "bridgeboard", which connects the Zorro and ISA buses. Such bridgeboards typically feature on-board IBM PC Compatible hardware, including Intel 80286, 80386 or 80486 microprocessors allowing emulation of an entire IBM-PC system in hardware. Compatible ISA cards may then be installed in the remaining ISA slot.
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