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Amiga computer related discussion => General chat about Amiga topics => Topic started by: AmigaFreak on June 01, 2013, 04:18:44 PM
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I have a question that I only just recently questioned. I used an A1000 most of my childhood, and of course kickstart loaded off floppy. Why did Commodore not have the kickstart on ROM yet? - Most other oses at the time had atleast some kind of bios or monitor on rom. Heck, Acorn's RISCOS was completly on rom. Does anyone know why Commodore decided to do this on their first Amiga computer?
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Because the kickstart wasn't ready yet when the A1000 shipped.
I'm surprised they didn't offer an officially sanctioned ROM kickstart solution once the OS became more stable.
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There are pins on the motherboard to install a Kickstart, albeit split over 2 chips. Some companies/users developed daughterboards that allow a regular Kickstart chip to be used.
Plus, disks are cheaper. And with OS evolving so quickly in those days (and the A1000's production window cut short by the introduction of the A500 and A2000) it probably wasn't cost effective to put Kickstart into silicon.
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Kickstart is more than just a BIOS like a PC. It does actually contain a lot of required functionality for even Workbench (albeit low level stuff) so it would have been nuts to ship with KS 1.0 on ROM for such an expensive computer. It's not like it takes long to load Kickstart and you never need to load it again IME unless you power off the machines. Great machines for ripping MODS/graphics with tools BTW.
KS 1.3 to 2.0 took forever to develop but we had 3 revisions between A1000 and A500/2000 launches ie 18 months.
I also remember that it's quite famous when C= execs visited the original Amiga OS developer they found him a little crazy (holed up in his room talking frequently to his rabbit in the cage specifically) and I think that helped them to go with Dr Tim King's TriPOS reworking for Amiga OCS/architecture for Kickstart/Workbench as we know it today. Hard to have confidence in the black art of OS software/firmware in that sort of environment.
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What I've heard is that Kickstart was too buggy so it was better to do a floppy Kickstart rather that having it in firmware. I suppose this would have saved C= a lot of problems from users having Kickstart related problems.
There are pins on the motherboard to install a Kickstart, albeit split over 2 chips.
I didn't know this. Sounds to me like it was a last minute decision to go floppy. Support the buggy Kickstart theory;)
I have an A1000 with an Insider board and MC68010. Wonder if it's woth tinkering with a Kickstart ROM...
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It was not even close to being ready and C= was rushing to get the Amiga out since Atari beat them to the punch with the 520 ST!
Funny too that the ST also was released with a disk based OS as it's OS was not ready too! TOS was on disk! It laster came on ROM on the 520ST and 1040ST's.
Kickstart was 1.0 at release and very buggy, it wasn't until 1.2 that it was stable for ROM.
The A1000 has FOUR rom spots that a set of ROM was released for developers, but no official release from C=.
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The A1000 has FOUR rom spots that a set of ROM was released for developers, but no official release from C=.
Yeah, I've seen some mods you can buy that allow you to add ROMs to your 1000, but they all involve soldering. Not just putting something in those ROM sockets.. So I wonder how complete/compatible they were...
Personally, I like the ROM on a floppy... ;-) Way easier to change ROMs. (At least until 2.x came out and it wouldn't fit anymore)
desiv
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Whare does bootstrap come from then?
in WinUAE you can load a file as a ROM which is an 8Kb bootstrap,
then it makes a short tune, and asks for Kickstart floppy, then for Workbench.
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Whare does bootstrap come from then?
in WinUAE you can load a file as a ROM which is an 8Kb bootstrap,
then it makes a short tune, and asks for Kickstart floppy, then for Workbench.
There is a small bootstrap rom on the Amiga 1000 that does some very low level stuff and is responsible for loading Kickstart from disk and then reseting the machine.
I thought have Kickstart on Disk was really smart and disliked the Amiga 500/2000 having it in ROM. I knew it would be much harder to update Kickstart or use beta Kickstarts without having it on disk.
I know I was in a minority.
A Kickstart Story:
Commodore and EA showed up in our city with the brand new Amiga 500 demo unit to show it off. This was the Amiga 500 that had one Commodore key and one Amiga key instead of two Amiga keys on either side of the spacebar.
Anyway, they were demoing the machine and I asked about loading alternate Kickstarts for compatibility. For example, Archon or ACS would not load on the Amiga 500 because of Kickstart 1.2.
Without missing a beat, the EA guy says that by holding down Control-Commodore-Amiga that it would eventually ask for a Kickstart disk. He tried it several times and it did not work. He eventually called EA and spoke to someone. They too thought it should work.
When he returned he shrugged and said, "I guess they took that feature out."
The EA guy was so sure that it would work, that I wondered if that was talked about at some point?
The Commodore guy had no information and was of little help. I think he was just a sales guy traveling around with this thing.
Obviously, to add that feature on a 500 would have required additional memory and control chips which the machine lacks, however, I just thought it was an interesting moment. That idea had to come from somewhere. EA must have known that many of their games broke under 1.2 so they would have benefitted from a feature like that.
Cheers!
-P
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That would be a minority, I didn't have an A1000 until later,
but for the A500 I would have been glad to have it in a solid state device
rather than something that wears out, before load times entered into it.
With that 8K bootstrap, everything from the 7817th byte is all 1s.
A lot of what is before that would have to be data for the hand holding disk image.
I don't know what it would take to reset it in such a way to make it remember to
just look at that little bit of data it needs to boot, and then check the floppy disk,
but the image data for the hand holding blue Kickstart disk doesn't appear to exist
in the Kickstart 1.3 ROM, and it would need to be if it had to show that screen.
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That would be a minority, I didn't have an A1000 until later,
but for the A500 I would have been glad to have it in a solid state device
rather than something that wears out, before load times entered into it.
Not sure..
I also prefer the floppy..
And as for "wears out".. My original kickstart disks still work.
And the copies I routinely boot from still work...
In fact, I have a CF hard disk on my A1000 that requires a boot floppy.
But, using kickwork, I have one floppy disk that sits in my A1000. Boot it up, it loads kickstart, then off of the same disk it loads the hard disk driver and then passes control over to the hard disk. Easy... When I need kick 1.2 (or lower), I have those disks..
I'm not saying it's better than ROM, but it's actually not a big deal..
The only real drawback is that there's only enough memory for the kickstart 1.x series.. Of course, I kind of like 1.x on my A1000... ;-)
desiv
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Big fan of Kickstart on disk and one of the great alluring features of the A1000. In fact, BITD, I thought it stupid C= even considering placing it in ROM. Especially when you were an early adopter and/or were aware of the changes to come so early on. None of Commodore's machines made it particularly easy for the end user to swap ROMS (especially in an A2000!), so in the relatively short time of 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 and 2.x... was ridiculous all the changes there for a while. Should have kept it on floppy or made it a helluva lot easier to swap the ROM, such as through a trap door, side plane, whatever.
BTW: all my original DS/DD Kickstart disks still work after all these years. In fact, even with all the horse trading, buying and selling I've done, have yet to run across a bad original Kickstart disk.
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I have to admit that I'm slowly changing my opinion on this topic. When I got my A1000 I found it a bit annoying with the extra floppy change. But now I have "upgraded" to KS1.3 without much hazzle. And I can "downgrade" easily for compatibility reasons if I need to. I belive I could strip some things from a WB floppy and create a combined KS/WB floppy and avoid the extra floppy change. Is this possible?
Too bad only that A1000 doesn't support KS larger that 256KB. I wouln't mind running KS2.x.
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Too bad only that A1000 doesn't support KS larger that 256KB. I wouln't mind running KS2.x.
http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/512kWOM
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Is that the thing to load it into some of your RAM?
We did that to run 2.0 when we really only had 1.3 ROMS.
but you lose some of your RAM.
Dirty pirates we are.. I later got it though.
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http://aminet.net/package/docs/hard/512kWOM
Thank you for that link! I guess you will loose 256KB of RAM to make up for the lack of WOM?
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@Art
The kickstart "hand" image is definitely in there but is most likely compressed. Looking at the picture it would be a good candidate for run-length encoding and also may be coded in a lower resolution than even 320x200 (e.g. just output the same colour for two pixels instead of one). Most of the screen itself is likely to just be a background colour that doesn't require a bitmap. The bitmap itself is centred where the pic is.
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@Art
The kickstart "hand" image is definitely in there but is most likely compressed. Looking at the picture it would be a good candidate for run-length encoding and also may be coded in a lower resolution than even 320x200 (e.g. just output the same colour for two pixels instead of one). Most of the screen itself is likely to just be a background colour that doesn't require a bitmap. The bitmap itself is centred where the pic is.
It isn't compressed in the V1.3 ROM image, but I think it is in the 8K bootstrap.
In the V1.3 image it is split into tiles all over the place.
It looks as if deliberately making it difficult to change.
It is also more than one bitmap.
I suspect up to four layers for some parts of it, but at least two.
The part where is says "Amiga" for example, is at least two layers
(maybe for some antialiasing?),
One layer of the "1" in "1.3" (for the Workbench requester)
is all on it's own, and so is one layer of the "bench", and one layer of the "Work".
I'm willing to bet this image has never been customised.
The actual hand and disk might be drawn the way you say.
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(http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v186/ArtArt/kickimages_zps5531d3f5.png) (http://smg.photobucket.com/user/ArtArt/media/kickimages_zps5531d3f5.png.html)
The green ones in this image I have verified by changing them and reloading Workbench.
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Hmmm. Interesting. Seems kind of a weird way to go about it. Maybe they were deliberately making it difficult.
As for whether the hand and disk are drawn that way; I was just guessing. Your original comment got me wondering...
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There might be reasons why they wanted some program code to be sequential,
and some of it to begin at even addresses in the ROM, and just used the
fragments left for imagery...
or they might have been trying to be difficult,
giving someone in the year 2013 a headache! :D
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Big fan of Kickstart on disk and one of the great alluring features of the A1000. In fact, BITD, I thought it stupid C= even considering placing it in ROM. Especially when you were an early adopter and/or were aware of the changes to come so early on. None of Commodore's machines made it particularly easy for the end user to swap ROMS (especially in an A2000!), so in the relatively short time of 1.1 to 1.2 to 1.3 and 2.x... was ridiculous all the changes there for a while. Should have kept it on floppy or made it a helluva lot easier to swap the ROM, such as through a trap door, side plane, whatever.
BTW: all my original DS/DD Kickstart disks still work after all these years. In fact, even with all the horse trading, buying and selling I've done, have yet to run across a bad original Kickstart disk.
+1 always kick my kick disk in my df0 and my 1000 boots up from my extrenal scsi drive. FWIW, all my original disks work fine and I love the sound of the drive singing before the scsi drive takes her to WB:biglaugh::cool:
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+1 always kick my kick disk in my df0 and my 1000 boots up from my extrenal scsi drive. FWIW, all my original disks work fine and I love the sound of the drive singing before the scsi drive takes her to WB:biglaugh::cool:
Great!
Could someone do me a favour, and take a worn disk such as all your Kickstart disks :D :D :D
and measure (with a ruler), the radius of the disk that is actually
read by the head.. it must be a little smaller than the opening in the shutter.
Be sure it's not a metal ruler that has become magnetised.
It probably sounds odd... but I don't have a floppy disk. I'll tell you why later :)
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Thank you for that link! I guess you will loose 256KB of RAM to make up for the lack of WOM?
Did you read the description? Among the parts needed are memory chips for another 256K, making the WOM 512K in size. You still boot from your kickdisk, only now you can use both 1.x and all recent verions.
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Did you read the description?
Honestly? No, I didn't. Can't open LHA files. Will deal with it tomorrow. Promise!
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I've read it now. Seems to be a lot of HW hacking. I'm not that desperat to use KS2.x with my A1000 anyway. But still interesting to see the creativity in the Amiga community!