Idea: Compact Flash-based kickstart (and thus HDD) replacement?

[AmigaHeretic]

Why not just soft kick if you already have a CF ide with your own custom rom file?

Set it up like this:

Turn Amiga on with a floppy in the drive (game or demo) it is going to use the ROM on the motherboard and boot the floppy as expected.  (My case 3.1 is the physical rom)  Most likely if your booting from floppy you won't wan't a 3.9.x custom hack for compatibility reasons.

If no floppy it will boot from the HD.  First thing it does transparently is soft boot your 3.9.x rom, reset and your then you're off and going.  If booting from the HD it just loads the HD.

So let's say you want to boot from USB.  Plug the USB device in the USB port and even at power on it will softkick/reset/ and start booting your USB drive transparently.

I'd also have a script that when booting from the HD if you hold a key down it will bring up a menu that lets you choose any version of the ROM to softkick.  1.x -> 2.x -> 3.x


Best of every possible world.    No custom hardware needed at all.

[AmigaHeretic]

It is not the best really. You will notice a big boot delay if you do that,

False.
3.9 already does this and it so fast it is almost undetectable when booting from CF.

and then if you dont have a MMU to protect the memory space where the kickstart is, some program, most likely a patch will probably corrupt that memory area, and guru your Amiga.

False.
Just about everybody that uses 3.9 IS softkicking (except the 3 people that have burned their own 3.9 rom).  So this seems very unlikely.

Another drawback, especially for low end sistems is that you will loose as much memory as your rom occupies (512KB, 1MB or 2MB depending on this new kickstart size).

True, but we are talking about people wanting to use a 3.9 kickstart.  If you are using 3.9 you have a ram expansion.

If your disk gets screwed someway, bye bye kickstart.
So there are a lot of disadvantages, and much more that I dont remeber right now.

Again this is ridiculous.  First of all the kickstart ROM will always be on the motherboard.  If your harddrive crashed I think the last thing you would worry about would be a kickstart image file.  


This whole posts sounds like you are posting fud.