Amiga 3000 and Kickstart 1.4

[Alma96]

Hello,

Is it possible to replace this version of kickstart with 2.04 or 3.1 for instance, if I want to use an accelerator to speed up thing ?

Is the motherboard the same as A3000 with KS2.04 ?

[Brian]

You should be able to swap the kickstart with another A3000 kickstart. Only thing I'm not to sure of is with the romtower of revision 7.1 motherboards.

[melott]

You can use any KS roms that are for the A3000.
My A3k origonally had the KS 1.4 roms, I now have KS 3.1
roms installed. Pay close attention to how you remove the
old chips and install the new ones the same way. Most rom
towers are marked wrong and its easy to install the chips
in the wrong socket (beleave me.. I just did it  :-D  )

I thought that the A3000 loaded its kickstart from disk? :-?

[PaSha]

mdma wrote:
I thought that the A3000 loaded its kickstart from disk? :-?

Yup, the ones equipped with Kickstart 1.4 in ROM load a Kickstart image from disk.
But the procedure only works with the onboard 68030, and if you want to use a faster CPU you need to have a proper Kickstart in ROM (or use a beta OS1.4)

-Paul

PaSha wrote:

mdma wrote:
I thought that the A3000 loaded its kickstart from disk? :-?

Yup, the ones equipped with Kickstart 1.4 in ROM load a Kickstart image from disk.
But the procedure only works with the onboard 68030, and if you want to use a faster CPU you need to have a proper Kickstart in ROM (or use a beta OS1.4)

-Paul

Can't you just use Blizkick?

[Lemmink]

The problem is, the part in the kick 1.4 ROM that loads the kickstartfile from disk uses an instruction that is illegal for an 68040/68060. So a machine with kick 1.4 and 040/060 simply wouldn`t do anything.

Lemmink wrote:
The problem is, the part in the kick 1.4 ROM that loads the kickstartfile from disk uses an instruction that is illegal for an 68040/68060. So a machine with kick 1.4 and 040/060 simply wouldn`t do anything.

I see, but surely Blizkick would work ok?

[TjLaZer]

@mdma

If it would work on a A3000, it could work fine, but on a 040+ no it will not work at all.

I use to softkick to 3.1 on my A3000 with a 030 before I got the 3.1 upgrade.  I got the special ROM tower ROMs and had to install them reverse of what was silk screened on mobo.

[adolescent]

mdma wrote:

Lemmink wrote:
The problem is, the part in the kick 1.4 ROM that loads the kickstartfile from disk uses an instruction that is illegal for an 68040/68060. So a machine with kick 1.4 and 040/060 simply wouldn`t do anything.

I see, but surely Blizkick would work ok?

No.  The bootstrap ROM doesn't work with the 040/060 MMU.  

[PaSha]

No.  The bootstrap ROM doesn't work with the 040/060 MMU.  

Well, have a look at http://www.gregdonner.org/workbench/wb_b14.html

Jeff Grimmett explains how to see OS 1.4 with a softkicked A3000:

Shutdown the Amiga.

Hold down both mouse buttons when you power on.

You will get an OS 1.3 / OS 2.0 selection menu. Select neither!
Instead, move your cursor to where the window's close gadget SHOULD be (upper left) and click it.
You might have to fumble around, but eventually the computer will react and boot into 1.4. You will of course get error messages as the OS 2.x partitions will be used for startup, and they require newer kickstarts, but you'll see some rather interesting GUI concepts :-)


So, in theory you could do this on every cold boot and then run Blizkick from the startup-sequence.
Whether it works or not, who knows? Perhaps someone with an A3000 actually bothers to try?

-Paul

[adolescent]

@PaSha

That's assuming you can even get to the boot screen with the 040/060 enabled.  In my limited experience you get a yellow screen at startup.  But, that may have been something with the Mercury 040 I had.

[Brian]

Tried a CS060MK2 in a A3000 with 1.4ROM's and all it produce is a black screen and that's that. First thought INT2 so had that done, still nothing. Same happened when a 3640 was installed. So you actually need at least Kickstart 2.0 to be able to start an A3000 with 040+. Neither Blizkick or the internal "softkick" in the A3000 will work as the machine doesn't get as far as to load anything.

[adolescent]

@Brian

Maybe my experience was a black screen as well.  All I remember is it didn't work.  (It's been 12+ years since I tried)

[PaSha]

Well, Kick1.4 was beta (AFAIK) and probably had some issues with 68040's. Does anyone know if 68040/68060's work with Kick1.x at all?