Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3

[Bugala]

@yorgle

I guess they updated "Instant Music" at some point, since when I got my first A500 (1.3 something), it was bundled with Instant Music and as far as i recall, worked fine.

[Minuous]

Plenty of games will work on KS1.2 but not 1.3. Whereas I don't know of any that will work on 1.3 but not 1.2. Therefore it's always best to use KS1.2.

[danbeaver]

@yorgle, I guess they updated "Instant Music" at some point, since when I got my first A500 (1.3 something), it was bundled with Instant Music and as far as i recall, worked fine.

....

Plenty of games will work on KS1.2 but not 1.3. Whereas I don't know of any that will work on 1.3 but not 1.2. Therefore it's always best to use KS1.2.

I believe that the most recent reincarnation of this very old thread has moved beyond the title, and if one picks up with post #42 (based on earlier discussions), then you will find a different area of concern over compatibility.

[Cosmos]

Anyone about a Kickstart 1.3.1 ? or 1.3.2 ? I don't remember exactly...

Back in the days, if my memory is good, a friend of mine had this new Kickstart into his A500... I saw the white hand & floppy with 1.3.1 (or 1.3.2...) !

Where to download ?

[paul1981]

Plenty of games will work on KS1.2 but not 1.3. Whereas I don't know of any that will work on 1.3 but not 1.2. Therefore it's always best to use KS1.2.

I'm sure you contradict yourself here. Or am I losing the plot?

[olsen]

I could not disagree more.  I was an actual beta tester for OS 1.3 and it was much more than 1.2 with the HD boot fix.  There were quite a lot of bugs fixed in 1.3 and some real improvements as well.

It has been a long time since I thought about this but the biggest change came in the file system.  It was more robust, it handled minor errors way better than 1.2, disk doctor was finally killed off, and it was more stable.

I used to post my bug reports on BIX at the time.  Good memories!

-P

I checked and I can confirm this (except for the DiskDoctor command). Commodore (specifically, Bart Whitebook) wrote the following on October 19, 1987 regarding Kickstart 1.2.1 (which appears to be the in-house name for the product until it was rechristened "Kickstart 1.3"):

V1.2.1 is an incremental kickstart release.  It is designed to  maintain V1.2 compatiblity throughout, while adding two important features to the operating system.  These features are 1) autoboot from ROM-based expansion devices and 2) a larger preferences structure for future expansion.

The same document then details the changes since Kickstart 1.2 (v33.180):

- expansion.library (functional change, internal only)
- graphics.library (size change, no functional changes)
- strap (functional change, internal only)
- romboot (new module added to support autoboot)
- workbench (size change, no functional changes)
- dos.library (functional change, internal only)
- intuition.library (functional change, extended preferences only)

The remaining 17 components remained unchanged.

As far as I can tell "functional change, internal only" most likely stands for "bug fixes and performance tweaks" and "size change, no functional changes" was likely the result of recompiling the code (after upgrading the compiler).

I had a closer look at dos.library, which at the time would contain the entire file system code. As far as I can tell, the most changes in the dos.library code occured in the file system portion. There are more than 80 changes (counting not the number of changed lines, but the number of change sets checked in) which both fix bugs and improve reliability, as well as improving performance.

As for the DiskDoctor command, it was updated to avoid "repairing" volumes formatted using FFS, and it shipped with Workbench 1.3.