Kickstart switch for A3000?

[trixeo]

Is there or has there ever been a kickstart switch for A3000? I have the 1.4 ROMS but would be cool to have the 1.3/3.1 combo.

[trixeo]

You could combine two switches for a 500/2000 - but for what purpose? You can softkick any Kickstart you like with MMU help. Ditch 1.4 and put in 3.1.

I did not realize the built in softkick still would work when changing kickstart? I thought that was a feature of that 1.4 ROM only. Guess I can try myself, I have a 3.1 kit waiting for me at the post office =)

[trixeo]

BTW, is there a hardware 1.3 ROM for A3000?

[trixeo]

You can either use the 1.4 ROMs to kick 3.1 (just use in place of 2.1) or replace with 3.1 ROMs and use a Kickstart utility when you want anything else (I think I used zkick in the old days).

A pretty simple Kickstart detection in S:startup-sequence can be used to branch to the appropriate Workbench installation so you get the same behavior (and more) as with the 1.4 ROMs.

Yes, I know this, but I'd rather have it hardware-wise. Maybe I'll try to get hold of another Datic Kickstart Switch, I have one for my A500. But then I need to get hold of a 1.3 ROM for A3000, if there even is one.

[trixeo]

Thanks for the answer! I need to buy a EPROM burner
No, I think I'll stick to cleaning up battery acid and recapping
Interesting though.

[trixeo]

I dont want 3.1 roms i want to soft kick into 3.1 and be able to softkick into 1.3 as well. Any help is appreciated

I got an A3000 w/o HDD so all I did was boot with a WB-disk, set an old HDD up with HDToolbox, named the partition WB_2.x and placed a 3.1 kickstart named kickstart in WB_2.x:Devs/
If you need 1.3 then I think you need to create a second partition for that, called WB_1.3 and place the 1.3 kickstart file named kickstart in WB_1.3:Devs/
I think I recalled reading somewhere that once you boot into eg. 1.3 with this setup, the WB_2.x partition is hidden and the other way around.

EDIT.
If you don't have a HDD at all you need a superkickstartdisk. The only one I have is a 1.3/2.04 floppy. You need to put that in when booting when you're at the kickstart choice sreen. If you do not have this disk and no HDD the only kickstart you can boot is 1.4 by clicking the invisible "close" button on the kickstart choice screen in the top left corner.

The kickstart is stored in RAM so it will get reset to 1.4 even if you loaded 1.3, 2.04 or 3.1 before, once you cold boot it again. The best way is to get a new HDD for your machine, they're not expensive and there's plenty of them on ebay. I just bought a FastATA MK-VI 4000 CF/SATA so that I can use new SATA-disks or CF-card instead of the noisy old SCSI.

[trixeo]

No they're not. I got mine on a disk that came with my A3000, named "Kickstart 40.70 A3000" which also included maprom and maprom.doc. As I understand it though the most stable version is the 40.68 where the only change to 40.70 is the scsi.device (v40.12 to v40.20). I wanted the 40.68 so I grabbed it from Amiga Forever with Amiga Explorer and cut and pasted the extra "bonus-code" that A3000 needs into a new 40.68 kickstart-file.
I bought and installed 3.1 (40.68) hardware kickstart now from Vesalia, which did have badly slapped on labels. I miss though to have the option to boot directly into 1.3 like I do with my A500 and a kickstartswitch.

[trixeo]

First of all, the roms in AF are encrypted, so you need to load them into a WinUAE-enviroment and extract it either with a command in the enviroment or connect Amiga Explorer to it and get the kickstart out. Load the exact same version in WinUAE as you have already a superkickstart of. Then you can do a byte by byte comparison with the superkickstart you have. I opened them up in Funduc Software Hex Editor for example. An ordinary 512k ROM ends with offset 524287=0x7ffff bits=00011111 unsigned B:31 (1f). Last four bits: "00:1e:00:1f". Now open up the superkickstart version of the same version and go to the same offset. You will find the "00:1e:00:1f" in that too, however that's not the last line in it. The rest following it until the end is the "bonus code". I just used that bonus code and cut and pasted it into a 3.1 (40.68) at the end of it. The resulting file should be 526 572 bytes.