A1000 and OS2/OS3

Hello everyone in Amiga land.  I have very much been out of the scene for quite some years.  I own an original A1000 with an A590 HDD unit (10-20MB!!).  I also have a 40Gb (ish) SCSI drive attached to the A590's controller.  I have 1Mb of RAM total (!), 512K on board and 512K in the A590.  I actually have 2Mb worth of Chips in the A590, but for some reason whenever I activate more than 512K the Amiga freezes when accessing them.  As a side question, does anyone know if this is an inherent problem with the A1000, or if I've just got faulty RAM?

Anyway, to my main question...  How do I get OS2 or 3 working on this machine.  I have vague notion, but after being stuck in the Wintel world for many years, my Ami knowledge is a little rusty...  (BTW: I actually work as a PC technician, so I am not completely computer illiterate...)  I love my Amiga, and would dearly love to give it a new lease on life...

Any help at all in this would be much appreciated.

Feel free to e-mail me.

Thanks,

Rob

[pjhutch]

You cannot use WB 3.x on A1000 as its for the later models, although WB 2.x is possible. You need Kickstart 2 Chip (or an image) or one and the WB 2 disks. Unfortunately, WB 2 is very hard to find these days. Try http://www.amibench.org and add a Wanted ad.

Also try Aminet for some documentation on how to get a KS 2 on a A1000
e.g. KickWom.lha, 20rom_a1000.lha, 512KWOM.lha

See http://de.aminet.net/
 

[odin]

 :-?

I thought there are ppl who are running 3.1 A1000s? Haven't I seem some of them floating around here? redrum? A1000JH?

[MayhemMaybe]

The issue with the unmodified A1000 (ones you have to use a Kickstart disk to boot) is that they only have 256k in the RAM tower used to load Kickstart. With 2.0 Commodore went to 512k Kickstarts which are obviously too large to fit in that RAM. This RAM is totally separate from system RAM so it can't be upgraded.

You have a few choices.
1) You can get an Amiga 500 which can use the 512k Kickstart ROM chips. This is the easiest choice and should be relatively inexpensive nowadays.
2) Try to find a Kwikstart (I think that was what it was called) board for the A1000. It was made by the same company that made the Multistart boards for the 500/2000, DKB, and allows the 1000 to use the same Kickstart ROMS as the 500/1000. This is probably on par with the difficulty of finding a Phoenix replacement motherboard for the 1000 for sale. These things are extremely rare to find outside a 1000 if you ever find them or sale.
3) If you have extra System RAM you can get a Kickstart image for 2.0 or 3.1 and use ykick or Twinkick from Aminet. These programs load the kickstart image into system RAM and then reboot the Amiga 1000 using that image instead of the 1.x image in the Kickstart RAM tower. You will lose about 512k of system RAM though and your computer will take longer to boot since you'll have to load your original kickstart, then boot with a disk with the program and kickstart ROM image which will then reboot the machine to use the new ROM.
4) If your really adventurous you can try this document from aminet: KickWOM.lha (in Docs/Misc)which is supposedly to modify an A1000 to load 512k Kickstart images.

Good luck.

[tonyw]

If you are a reasonable technician, it's easy to modify an A1000 to accept the Kickstart ROM from an A500. I modified mine with a 2.1 Kickstart ROM, and I run WB3.1 on my A1000.

If you can't work it out from the circuit diagrams, there are descriptions on aminet /hard/hack I think.

tony

Wow!  Thanx for all the help people...  I will get on down to Aminet and see what I can find, at least I should be able to get 2.0 running in some form or another...

Anyone any ideas on my other question about the RAM in my A590 unit?

Thanks again to all!!

-Rob-