Q: Amiga 3000 Kickstart

[tone007]

Hello all!

 Just landed my very first Amiga 3000 and am just now starting to poke around a bit. It came with an OS'less 52mb Quantum HD, but I just happened to have an exact replacement from an A2000 pull that has OS2 on it as well as a bevy of cool programs and utilities. After terminating the HD with the resistor packs (had to yank 'em from the old drive), the system booted up rather quickly and I was able to mess around a bit. First off, holy smokes this system seems 'fast' to me! HD operations and such. This 25mhz 030 built in is no slouch, but I guess the SCSI bus is exceptionally fast on the A3000 too, which is contributing to the overall speedy feel of the machine.

Okay, my question is this: there are 2.04 ROMS on the ROM Tower in it now. If I remove those, will the machine ask for a Kickstart Disk just as the A1000 does? I read something about a Kickstart 1.4... does that need to be installed in order for me to boot a different Kickstart from the HD?

I never had OS 2.x, so even its early Startup menu is foreign to me. Neat little system, although I'm sure I'll be wanting to upgrade her to 3.1. Using Sysinfo and looking at the mobo though, I was able to conclude that she's got 2mb of Chip Ram, 8mb of Fast zips and the 030/882 at 25mhz.

It won't ask for a kickstart disk with no ROMs, you'll get nothing.  Kickstart 1.4 (a different set of ROMS) is for softbooting A3000 specific "superkickstarts," and is only compatible with '030 processors.  If you plan on going to an 040 or 060, you'll want real 3.1 ROMs.

[tone007]

If you have the second set of sockets installed (closer to the front of the board, I believe,) I think you can safely just put the ROMs in there, not in the sockets where the tower is though.  Some mixup on early revision boards are the reason for the tower.  As for A2000 ROM compatibilty, I've never gotten that to work, though A2000 ROMs may be missing the scsi.device needed for the A3000's SCSI anyway.

[tone007]

The screen will flash "softkicking KS 2.0.." or something like that before rebooting into the softkicked system, also, I think holding down both mouse buttons with 1.4 ROMs will present you with a boot menu (KS1.3 floppy/hd, KS2.0 floppy/hd.)  You can also click out of the boot menu and see some hidden stuff.

[tone007]

devs:kickstart

This thread might help. http://www.amiga.org/forums/showthread.php?t=15859

..and it has to be a superkickstart file with the "bonus" code, a regular ROM image won't work.

[tone007]

My A3000 has no kickstart ROM chips.

I don't believe you.

[tone007]

It's called kickstart 1.4, and it's a full 2 kickstart chips that go where they're supposed to.  There's also more to it than you've seen.

[tone007]

Dumping the ROMs won't work at all.  You need a superkickstart file.