Hyperion: "Halloween special double-treat for the Classic AmigaOS"

[Matt_H]

It's a nice gesture, but...

The most important thing that could be done to polish up 3.1 would be 4GB+ support for scsi.device, FFS, and HDToolbox. Other nice things would be additional datatypes, additional BOOPSI gadgets, restoration/update of narrator.device/translator.library/speak-handler/Say, font sensitivity in Prefs editors and other system utilities, and completion of specialfx.library.

I hope we see some more development in the 3.1 line. A SuperKickstart image for 3000s with 1.4 chips would be nice, too.

[Matt_H]

The scsi.device in this updated Kickstart 3.1 ROM is still version 40, not version 43, which sports large disk support and a multitude of enhancements and bug fixes.

The problem with scsi.device V43 and, for that matter, FastFileSystem V43 is that they are both significantly larger than the V40 versions. Hence, if you put the V43 versions into ROM, you would have to take something out of the ROM.

While this is technically feasible (see the A4000T ROM, which has special support code in it that will find and use the "workbench.library" located on any currently mounted volume, if the library cannot be found in "LIBS:"), it was important for this updated Kickstart 3.1 ROM set to contain all components which the 1994 ROM versions would.

Instead of putting in v43 scsi.device/FFS, could 64bit support be added to a new revision of v40? i.e., what I'm wondering with this line of inquiry is whether present day coding/compiling methods could achieve 64bit functionality in a smaller package than the ~1999 v43. Doesn't v43 also have all that NSD stuff (that I never really understood)? I would imagine that uses up some space and wouldn't be necessary for 3.1.

[Matt_H]

@ olsen

Wow, thanks for that answer. I had no idea it was that complicated. I suppose v43 would still be too large even with some of the compiler trickery you used on other components of this release?

[edit] Actually, now that I think about it, and if I'm remembering correctly, didn't the different version numbers of the original 3.1 (40.63/68/70) have to do with bugs/problems with scsi.device depending on platform? Now I see why! [/edit]

Looks like we need to start moving to 1MB ROMs across the board (although I know that means additional hardware/mods will be required...)

[Matt_H]

The fonts disk was always a strange one. The other disks all have a 3.1 suffix - Workbench3.1, Storage3.1, etc. but Fonts doesn't. Was that so floppy-only users could simply insert the disk and not have to worry about an assign? (Come to think of it, I think the Locale disk behaves the same way). Kinda strange that they didn't do an "assign fonts: fonts3.1: add defer" line in the floppy startup-sequence instead...