Burn a 3.9 Kickstart ROM?

[MarkAshley]

Would it be possible to burn a chip with the 3.9-patched 3.1 ROM? ie the 3.1 ROM with the "AmigaOS ROM Update" and everything else included with Setpatch, so that the initial reboot that setpatch causes wouldn't be required.

Just a thought  :-)

[Piru]

No.

The closest you can get is to use some Flash expansion card with romupdates included there.

SW solution is using BlizKick or RemAPollo, in which case you get just single reboot when powering up (the idea being here that you can combine most reset-requiring hacks into this single reboot. instead of multiple reboots you get just one).

[MarkAshley]

Piru wrote:
No.

Why not?  :-D

[Piru]

@MarkAshley

Why not?

Mainly because you can't fit all that into 512KB.

[MarkAshley]

Is the A1200 Kickstart made up of 2x256 ROMs then? (ie two separate chips of 256k each)

I would love to see a hardware mod to allow all of the kickstart patches loaded by setpatch to be available in ROM.

Large disk support from cold boot anyone?  ;-)

[Minuous]

What should be even easier than burning an Kickstart 3.9 chip would be to make a 3.9 Kickstart ROM file for UAE. However, no one seems to have done this...I'm not sure how to go about doing it? Any ideas?

[MarkAshley]

Yes that's true. I guess once the ROM image works in UAE, then we can think about getting it burned to a chip.

I am aware of some utilities that read the data from the ROM chip and save it to a file. Would this save the 3.9 patched ROM information that is loaded in RAM, or would it rip the 3.1 kickstart directly from the ROM chip?

[Piru]

@MarkAshley

Yes that's true. I guess once the ROM image works in UAE, then we can think about getting it burned to a chip.

Sure you can burn as many 1MB chips as you like, but there is nothing to plug them into.

I am aware of some utilities that read the data from the ROM chip and save it to a file. Would this save the 3.9 patched ROM information that is loaded in RAM, or would it rip the 3.1 kickstart directly from the ROM chip?

Well, since ROM cannot be written to, you just get the original KS 3.1 ROM contents.

Running romupdates can't be dumped to a file, anyway. Or actually you can dump them, but they would then ONLY work in this particular absolute RAM address, and nowhere else.

[MarkAshley]

So I guess we're stuffed then. A shame really! I hope OS4 for classic PPC machines will come with a new ROM chip (kickstart 4.0?)

[Minuous]

Doubt it; the market for that will be less than was the case for OS3.5 or OS3.9. And insufficient demand was quoted as the reason for not making Kickstart 3.5 or 3.9 chips.

[Thomas]

MarkAshley wrote:
So I guess we're stuffed then. A shame really! I hope OS4 for classic PPC machines will come with a new ROM chip (kickstart 4.0?)

Why should it ? OS4 loads the entire Kickstart from disk into fast memory. This is much more efficient than a slow ROM chip.

Also you have to consider that Kickstart 4.0 is PPC native but when you power-on the machine the 68k is active only. So having a PPC kickstart in the ROM chip would just crash.

Bye,
Thomas

[MarkAshley]

I see. So Kickstart 3.1 would only be required to access the disk in order to find the 4.0 kickstart image, load it in to RAM and reboot?

[keekqv]

Hi all

AFAIK the Amiga 1200/4000 and the CD32 can hold 1Mb ROMs. It was mentioned atleast in the finnish
computer magazine 'Mikrobitti's' review on A1200 (6-7/1993) and I've seen this info on other magazines
as well (at the time when the A1200/4000 were launched). Whether Commodore changed this spec to save
costs,is beyond me.

So,theoretically these machines can hold either 2x256 kb or 2x512 kb ROM's of 16-bit wide,although the
machine accesses them in 32-bit.(or 24-bit)

Nevertheless,it's a good idea.

Regards,

Kenneth