If I've followed these threads correctly, it worked at some point in the development cycle. So not to sound glib but you would think the "Huh, my HD is not autobooting anymore" would have been an issue someone would have spotted and mentioned. Its a fairly obvious bug. :-)
I'm not sure how common hard drives were around the release of 1.2, but have you considered that maybe nobody had an autobooting hard drive?
I got the impression that someone wrote the code, plugged in a card that had a test autoboot rom. They turned the computer on and checked the code got called and then moved on to the next piece of work.
Hello all,
Well, RJ posted this on 06/05/1986:
As a point of interest, even if Commodore ends up putting the ROM Kernel
system code in ROM, you will still be able to put a Kickstart disk in
the internal drive and have that code be loaded as the system code.
This allows further releases (as well as custom releases) of the Kickstart
even after the Amiga goes to ROM.
RJ was replying to a post about concerns with putting Kickstart in ROM on future Amigas.
So, at some point they had considered this for production.
I wouldn't read too much into it. RJ was software, not hardware and he left in 1986. The a2000 came out in 1987.
He may not have really known how the a1000 kickstart disks worked, he may have assumed that the new machines would ship with rom and the write protectable ram for kickstart. It may not have ever been considered.
The a1000 boot roms are quite small, but it's possible to hack the hardware to add larger roms. So you could merge kickstart and the normal boot roms and have it use the os from rom, or from kickstart. I haven't heard of anyone doing it, but it's entirely possible.
AFAIK for the a2000 commodore had a modified ram board for doing OS development. Someone might have seen that and assumed.
A couple of early A3000 offered the option to load a "super kickstart" from disk, which is - as you say - relocated to $200000. The kickstart sources include a special flag that performs this relocation and adds a couple of modifications to make it run.
It was more than a couple of A3000's and they use the MMU to remap kickstart.
The $200000 images were for softkicking on a500's and a2000's as most people didn't have an MMU.
A couple of problems remain, of course. Namely, expansion boards will typically not work.
There may have been some incompatibilities, but I believe it worked more often than it didn't.
I remember those super kickstart just a couple? Weren't they 1.4?
I think they used 36.16 as a starting point and then added the menu code, it says it's Kickstart 1.4 if you hack into it. Otherwise it's just a bootloader.
1.4a15 ¼MB 36.15 Alpha 15 AMIGA 3000 for use with "KickIt" software
1.4a18 ½MB 36.20 Alpha 18 AMIGA 3000 for use with "KickIt" software
1.4b1 ½MB 36.8 Beta 1 AMIGA 3000 for use with "KickIt" software
1.4b3 ½MB 36.16 Public Beta 3 AMIGA 3000 Has a menu that loads 1.3 or 2.0 roms
1.4b? ½MB 36.993 AMIGA 3000
1.4b? ½MB 36.1123 AMIGA 3000
1.4b? ½MB 36.1228 AMIGA 3000
2.0b5 ½MB 36.67 Beta 5 AMIGA 3000
2.0 ½MB 36.143 Beta OS 2.0 AMIGA 3000
2.01 ½MB 36.x Beta OS 2.0 AMIGA 3000
2.02 ½MB 36.x Beta OS 2.0 AMIGA 3000
2.03 ½MB 36.x Beta OS 2.0 AMIGA 3000
2.04 ½MB 37.175 Official OS 2.0