Q: Amiga 3000 Kickstart

[ChaosLord]

My A3000 has no kickstart ROM chips.  The kickstarts are located in DEVS: and get automagically loaded to fastram at boot.  Mine came from Commodore with a 2.x kickstart file and a 3.0 kickstart file.  So it is dead easy to downgrade to 2.x.  Also the OS routines run a lot faster from 32-bit burst-mode fastram.

[tone007]

My A3000 has no kickstart ROM chips.

I don't believe you.

[ChaosLord]

I don't believe you.

It may have some tiny little bootrom but not a real kickstart ROM.

[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.

[save2600]

Okay, until I get real KS 3.1 ROMS for my machine, a buddy dumped his ROMS from his 3000 for me to play around with.

I didn't know the Kickstart ROM needed to just be called KICK and have since put the HD back in the machine. SO, what I'm trying to do is put this Kickstart on floppy, boot from there so I can then go into my HD and rename the file appropriately - but I'm not having any luck.

Renamed the file to KICK and tried both creating a folder named Devs to put in there and left out. Nothing. The Floppy has been named wb_2.x...  the 'x' is correct? A number does not go in there?

Sounds like simply dumping ROMS from a machine with a different ROM tower might be the problem.

[tone007]

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

[save2600]

 Super-Kickstart?!?  lol  Okay, a quick trip over to Aminet revealed a program to do this. I'm gonna try it on my A2500 and see if I can make a Super-Duper Kickstart disk...  lmao!

-edit-

Just tried and now I get "Super Kickstart Bonus code missing"  

Oh well, more time "devoted" to the Amiga this afternoon. Always good practice opening/closing cases, pulling chips and resocketing them. lol

[TjLaZer]

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.

This is incorrect.  That 2nd set of ROMs are for a different set of EPROMs, not the original ROMs or 27C200 or 27C400.  I believe these other sockets are for developer ROMs (27C2048)

http://eab.abime.net/showpost.php?p=629262&postcount=6

Also 16-bit A500/2000 ROMs CANNOT be used in the 32-bit A3000 computer.

[Zac67]

Also 16-bit A500/2000 ROMs CANNOT be used in the 32-bit A3000 computer.

Have you tried? I found this out a few years ago and from the schematics it looks fine (see my post above).

[alexh]

The KS1.3 & KS3.1 SuperKickstart files have somehow found their way into his inbox from some anonymous source

Remember that as soon as you fit a CPU upgrade you can no-longer use a KS1.4 ROM.

Probably worth making your own A3000 KS3.9 EPROM using Doobrey's ROMsplit & Remus tools. I think they support the A3000 KS3.1 ROM files.

[save2600]

Thank you fellas! That did the trick and after renaming the HD and Kickstart ROM, she boots pretty darn quick. Coincidentally, I did just purchase a set of 3.1 ROMS for the old gal though, so I have the option of either software or hardware configs now!

Thanks again - I really appreciate it.