New Kickstart 3.9.1 68k on the way

[Ratte]

For Kickstart 3.1 there were different versions for different hardware because there wasn't enough time to fix all the bugs (they'd fix one and it would break something else) and also due to rom size (A4000T needing both scsi & ide for example). They could have pushed workbench.library onto disk for everybody and included all the devices with auto detection, but there wasn't a business case for it.

Thats not true.

There are different hardwarespecific versions of exec, expansion and devices.
The A1200,A3000,A4000 & CD32 versions are 020+ optimized .. not working on 68000.
The A3000 is very special .. the ONLY rom with real FPU-code inside !!!
A600/A1200 includes some PCMCIA-code.
A3000/4000 includes "bonus" for onboard fastmem.

[Ratte]

It's true that back in the day I ran Kickstart 3.0 from an A1200 on an A500 with a phase vi 14mhz 68000 (I didn't try 3.1 as I bought the a500 upgrade). It's true that they cherry picked different releases for each platform based on which worked at the time they submitted the 3.1 roms to manufacturing (I'm sure that years ago there was an description written by someone at commodore about why they picked each one). it's true that they could have produced one that worked in them all if there was a financial reason to.

The Blizzard Turbo Memory Board (68000/68010 @ 14MHz) with 512kb shadow memory worked with a 40.63 on my a1000.
A1200/4000 versions failed.

[Ratte]

The 'C' compilers used at the time were not considered sufficiently mature to produce '020 code suitable for ROM code.

If i remember correctly ... you were the last person who compiled a complete 3.1 rom out of the sources, with the latest compiler versions ... saving some bytes here and there.
with exec.library v40.11 and "escom ag copyright" text ... including a 40.68/40.70 for a500/600/2000 models (not that 40.63 stuff).

did you know the current owner of the "rights" on aos 3.x-sources?
escom -> gateway -> and now acer ?

@thomas richter:
isn´t layers.library v45 partially based on commodore-sources ?

[Ratte]

I believe that Hyperion owns these rights, as a result of the lawsuit between Amiga, Inc. and Hyperion.

Did AmigaInc. ever owned the rights?
I thought, they only owned the brand.

As a sideeffect, the rights and patents are still at escom (acquired by gateway, acquired by acer).