Here you find some useful resources to build your A3660 board with the construction kit we provide.
The backside of the board is almost already professionally pre-built for you. You only need to solder the 74F257 chip on position U500 and the Ferrite Bead on position FB100.
We will send you a floppy disk with the needed 68060.library files along with every assembled accelerator board and every construction kit. Here you can download an ADF image of this floppy disk.
Download the following documents:
- The bill of material (BOM), a list of all parts and their corresponding part numbers on the PCB
- A graphical overview and some important part numbers of the assortment box you received
We have prepared some useful images that will help you to assemble the board:
We recommend the following tools to assemble the board:
- An appropriate soldering station with a fine and medium soldering tip
- Fine and low-temperature soldering tin
- Soldering Flux (better soldering and kind of fixing parts while soldering)
- A cutter or pliers to remove the bottom of the GAL sockets
- Tweezers to place and hold small parts
- Toothbrush and Isopropanol alcohol for cleaning the PCB
Some hints for assembling the board:
A.) We recommend to start with the low profile parts first (i.e. resistors and capacitors) followed by the parts that have higher profile.
B.) Putting some soldering flux on the solder joints and then putting the ICs in place before soldering simplifies the soldering process enormously.
C.) The new PCB (REV 1.2) features a 3-pin jumper near R101 to select the delay between “5ns” for normal operation (50MHz crystal) and “10ns” for overclocked operation (64 MHz crystal).
D.) R510 is a selector. You can select the installed CPU model (either 040 or 060. There is an important difference regarding power supply between the Motorola 68040 and 68060 CPU models. The 68040 models works with 5 Volts, whereas the 68060 CPU work with 3.3 Volts! If you are using a 68060 CPU, put the resistor at R510 to the “060” marked position and install the Voltage Regulator LM1085 at VR1 position (this will power the CPU with 3.3 Volts, de LM1085 transforms the 5V of the board to 3.3V for the CPU area only). Otherwise, if you are using a 68040 CPU, put the resistor on the “040” marked position and simply bridge the IN and OUT pins of VR1 (this way the CPU will be powered with 5V. But be careful, powering a 68060 CPU with 5V will destroy it beyond recoverability!!! So always keep this information in mind if you should ever change the CPU model on your board (i.e. from 040 to 060 or vice-versa)!
E.) Watch out to mount the mainboard connector CN100 in the correct direction. There is a little white arrow printed on the long KEL connector which indicates pin 1 (cp. with pin 1 printed on the circuit board).
F.) We recommend to solder the PLCC sockets for the GALs with the solder iron. Watch this video for more details. Another possibility is to use a hot-air station, but it’s a little bit more advanced.
Some hints for installing the accelerator board to your Amiga computer:
First of all, don’t forget to set the mainboard jumpers correctly! You will find appropriate information on the backside of the Printed Circuit Board (PCB) or the Internet.
If you are using an 68LC060 CPU (with MMU, without FPU), you can use any Kickstart ROM and you may want to skip this section. However, if you are using a full 68060 CPU (i.e. with MMU+FPU), you either need to use the new 3.1.4 Kickstart ROMs or my custom Kickstart ROM 3.9. Remove your Kickstart ROMs from their sockets (using a small and flat screw driver and wipe alternately from from both sides of the IC to slowly put it out. Then place the new Kickstart ROMs in the same sockets (watch out for little notch to place them in the correct direction!). Make sure all pins fit nicely to the sockets.
Now firmly put the accelerator board to the processor socket of your Amiga. You can use a office ruber to push on the upper side solder joints of the long processor sockets in order to exert enough force to cleanly merge the connectors.
If you are using a 68060 CPU on your board, keep in mind that you will need to install appropriate 68060.library files to your LIBS: folder on your hard-drive (such as the Phase5 68060 libraries: http://phase5.a1k.org/)
If you encounter any problems or have further questions, you can contact us by the contact form on this page.