New Kickstart 3.9.1 68k on the way

[paul1981]

I had a quick look at Torsten Jager's "compactflash.device", and I think that there are no technical reasons why it could not be put into ROM.

The harder part is in mounting the file system (such as Torsten Jager's "fat95"), and mounting it early enough so that it becomes available at boot time.

As far as I can tell the "fat95" file system is not suitable for ROM use, but small changes might make it so. I did not check, but if I remember correctly the "CrossDOSFileSystem", which would serve a similar purpose, is not fit to be put into ROM because it was always intended to be loaded from disk. So a modified "fat95" file system suitable for ROM use might be the only option right now.

That leaves the somewhat nontrivial matter of mounting the "CF0:" device. It's doable, though: "carddisk.device" in the A600/A1200 ROM is capable of it, and you can even boot off the volume once it has been mounted, if I remember correctly.

Why do we have to use fat95 with compactflash.device? Why can't we use our CF cards with FFS, PFS or SFS? Am I missing something here? If I wanted to boot differing Amiga OS's/configs from differing CF cards then why would I want it to be using FAT? I don't want to use FAT, except when exchanging files with my Windows PC.

[paul1981]

Blimey, one always gets something wrong

Yeah...maybe it's time you threw in the towel Olsen? :laughing:

[paul1981]

Explain again why you have workbench.library and icon.library in kickstart.

I can think of one good reason - backwards compatibility with existing floppy based software (even some games).
Without those two library's these disks would not boot anymore...they would hang as soon as the LoadWB command is run and a requester saying something like "Unable to open workbench.library" would appear. Same goes for icon.library. It would only serve to confuse users...
Nothing should be taken out of Kickstart. Nothing extra should be included either for the same reasons, but updating/optimising the versions of the software modules within the Kickstart seems perfectly okay to me.

[paul1981]

...so we don't have monstrous startup-sequence files like we currently do."slaapliedje

Seriously? I think 'monstrous' is a monstrous over exaggeration when talking about any Amiga boot sequence!