Custom Kickstart ROMs

[Castellen]

These will be available from kipper2k:
http://www.kipper2k.com/kickstarts.html

I definitely want those for my systems.

Hopefully he sorts out the mentioned licencing and gets the product rolling.  I designed and produced a similar tidy solution around 6 years ago (see attached) which was aimed as a simple flash based ROM replacement for anything A500 upwards.  The ROM modules were intended to be sold blank, so avoiding issues of needing licences for the product; and programmed using a purpose built low cost programmer connected to the Amiga parallel port.  I also developed all the Amiga software for controlling the programmer, which included facilities for manipulating ROM data (odd/even split/combine, verification, etc) and other fancy features.

Unfortunately I'm an electronics engineer; I'm not into retail supply, so needed someone else to do sales.  It was all rather disappointing after talking to a number of Amiga retailers who were all keen to know more, then sending away a number of free samples, only to never hear anything back.  Even a simple "sorry, not interested" would have been fine, or at least some kind of response to repeated follow ups.

And that was that....

[Castellen]

You would think this would be the sort of thing amigaKit would pick up

That you would.  I'm still at a loss on why I never heard back from any of the multiple dealers after sending engineering samples for evaluation.  It was fully functional and very simple to use (which was the entire point of the product), there were detailed instructions, the software included detailed AmigaGuide online help.  And I was more than willing to produce any form of additional user documentation required.  It's not like I was pushing some kind of half-arsed minimal effort hack-up.

I can only think they were concerned about guaranteed supply from a private individual, which I would understand.  Maybe there was something around potential licencing issues or a potential for a legal can of worms?  While I developed all of the hardware and software from scratch and the ROMs were supplied blank, there was the potential for the product to be used for piracy of licenced software, in the same way that selling a blank EPROM, CD, hard drive or floppy disk can be used to hold illegal copies of software.

That being said, why did no-one bother saying so?  Just a "thanks for your hard work, but we can't on-sell this due to xxxxx" would have been great.

Unfortunately I just wasn't in a position to set up online sales, plus I'm far from an expert at such things.  At the time I was working six simultaneous jobs, including international Amiga hardware service/support.  The FlashROM project evolved out of an idea while developing my own Amiga hardware debugging tools - so I gradually developed that as I had a few hours spare between other jobs.  The idea was to deliver something basic initally; then based around demand and user feedback, produce additional hardware such as higher capacity ROM modules and other Amiga hardware.  But obviously that never eventuated.  You never know, I might pick it up again one day.

While the FlashROM modules were nothing special, the design of the parallel port based programmer was fairly clever and flexible with what it could do - so for example would probably be capable of programming the Kipper2k modules without having to buy an expensive programmer.


Anyway.... Dan, I'll hopefully be out of this icy hole in late October.  Planning to resume Amiga hardware service soon after that.  Keep an eye on the website.