Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3

[Digiman]

21,000 games...90% OCS KS 1.x based hmmmmm.

The answer is KS 1.3 for classic non-AGA use.

[motrucker]

This is the main reason I keep my trusty old A1000 disk based Kickstart. There are quite a few games that need 1.2. I would rather use 1.3 when I can though.

[LaserBack]

21,000 games...90% OCS KS 1.x based hmmmmm.

The answer is KS 1.3 for classic non-AGA use.

that number is an exaggeration

[Lockon_15]

Total number od 21,000 might be a bit too high, but OCS percentage is actually more than 90%. HOL has some 440 AGA titles while OCS tops it with more than 5170...Kickstart 1.3 is the one...

[LaserBack]

Total number od 21,000 might be a bit too high, but OCS percentage is actually more than 90%. HOL has some 440 AGA titles while OCS tops it with more than 5170...Kickstart 1.3 is the one...

The HOL numbers you are counting is incorrect
HOL manages titles with different names different versions,unrealesed titles.... and everything there is in the same bag
I estimate there are 1100 commercial amiga games in total AGA and CD32 included
PD games,sharware and PC ports is another story which can add maybe 1000 buggy titles

[Lockon_15]

Commercial or not, PD or shareware, native Amiga or ported, that doesn't change the fact they run on Amiga and thus are indeed accountable, versions put aside. As I understand, key question is what fraction of Amiga games require Kickstart 1.2 in order to run flawlessly. Getting exact number od total titles might be quite a challenge. HOL is just a single reference, I can also quote 'Lemon Amiga' with more than 3450 titles, followed by some 2400 at SPS/CAPS and a WHDLoad trailing at 2200. I guess that previous poster meant 21000 floppy disks or something like that. 20,000 games were maybe total count for Sinclair or C64, not for 16-bit machines.
BTW, what is 'buggy' by your definition ? Something that won't run on KS1.2 ?

[dougal]

For best compatibility and speed use KS 3.1 with WHDLoad and hard drive.

WHDLoad requires 1MB chipram & 2MB+ fastram to work properly.

There are a couple of games that need 2MB chipram. Wizkid WHDLoad for example will not run without 1.1MB.

You can use WHDLoad without fastram but that would mean having to disable the PRELOAD option which makes the games work much worse than if you had to play them from floppy disks.

[dougal]

If you want an A500 for classic games to be played from floppy disk your best option would  probably be an A500 with Kickstart 1.3 (or 1.2) + 512K expansion. (512K chipram + 512K Slowram).

If you want a classic A500 to use WHDLoad your best oprion will probably be an A500+ with a 1MB trapdoor expansion & a harddrive/fastram expansion such as an A590 or the Kipper fastram/compact flash IDE board & upgrade the kickstart to 3.1.

A500+ has the advantage that it can address 2MB chipram WITHOUT any expensive MiniMegi chip or similar. The A500 can only address 1MB chipram as standard.

[psxphill]

Is it possible to boot from HD with KS 1.3?
I tried it with Minimig and it doesn't work: booting from HD works from 2.05.
Maybe it's because Minimig uses A600 IDE?

Yes, you need to build a kickstart 1.3 that includes the scsi.device from the 2.05 rom to be able to boot from an a600 ide interface on 1.3. The same thing would happen trying to run 1.3 on an A1200 or A600.
 
For 1.3 to boot from hard disk, it needs a device driver in rom for the hard disk controller. On a500/a1000/a2000 bootable hard drives that rom is on the hard disk interface card.
 
A600/A1200/A3000/A4000 had built in hard disk interfaces so their kickstart had the driver in them. Although if you added an extra interface (i.e. SCSI on the A600/A1200/A4000) then that too would have to have a device driver in it's rom to be able to boot from it.

[arkpandora]

the best kickstart for games is 1.2

in fact there are not games that works on 1.3 but don't works on 1.2

My brand new "Mr. Nutz" was the only one of my non-AGA games that didn't work on a KS 1.2 A500 with 1 MB (512 KB Chip + 512 KB Fast), while it worked on an A4000.  Unless it required 1 MB of Chip RAM instead of 512 KB Chip + 512 KB Fast, that means it required at least KS 1.3.

[PanterHZ]

Yes, you need to build a kickstart 1.3 that includes the scsi.device from the 2.05 rom to be able to boot from an a600 ide interface on 1.3. The same thing would happen trying to run 1.3 on an A1200 or A600.
 
For 1.3 to boot from hard disk, it needs a device driver in rom for the hard disk controller. On a500/a1000/a2000 bootable hard drives that rom is on the hard disk interface card.
 
A600/A1200/A3000/A4000 had built in hard disk interfaces so their kickstart had the driver in them. Although if you added an extra interface (i.e. SCSI on the A600/A1200/A4000) then that too would have to have a device driver in it's rom to be able to boot from it.

An alternative can also be to use this: http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/GetSCSI11

Grab scsi.device from Kickstart 2.05 by using the supplied GetSCSI tool, and then create a boot disk with the resulting scsi.device file. Instructions are included with the package.

[guest11527]

are you sure?
from where you got that info?
just I tried a config on winuae....kickstart 1.2 with 1mb and 2mb chip ram and worked very well...no crashes and games and workbench worked fine

Yes, but... What Kickstart 1.2 did (and I believe the same also goes for 1.3) is that it first makes a "plausibility test" for the amount of chip mem when rebooting. If it finds more than 512K, it says "hoops, something is wrong, probably this is a cold start and I should try to find the amount of chip mem again".  

The end result is that you do get 1MB of chip RAM, but without further fixing, reset-resident system components won't work, i.e. "KickTagPtrs" and "KickTagMem" won't work. In specific, the RAD: ram drive is not reset-resident with 1MB chip and Kick 1.2 (and I believe also 1.3, this is an old and long-standing bug). With the arrival of Workbench 1.3, CBM included a hot-fix for this problem in SetPatch that essentially worked arond the problem, thus: Kick 1.2 plus 1.3 SetPatch or Kick 1.3 plus 1.3 SetPatch *will* work with 1MB chip mem, and will allow reset-resident programs.

Kick 1.3 was really a minimal recompile of 1.2, with the romboot.library added to allow booting from HD - this was the really new part that arrived in 1.3. Everything is just 1.2 as it came, most bugs included.

[Jope]

The end result is that you do get 1MB of chip RAM, but without further fixing, reset-resident system components won't work, i.e. "KickTagPtrs" and "KickTagMem" won't work. In specific, the RAD: ram drive is not reset-resident with 1MB chip and Kick 1.2 (and I believe also 1.3, this is an old and long-standing bug). With the arrival of Workbench 1.3, CBM included a hot-fix for this problem in SetPatch that essentially worked arond the problem, thus: Kick 1.2 plus 1.3 SetPatch or Kick 1.3 plus 1.3 SetPatch *will* work with 1MB chip mem, and will allow reset-resident programs.

Verified. SetPatch doesn't help here (I have the 1.3.3 setpatch). I just patched my 1.3 ROM to check for a max size of $200000 instead of $080000, burned a new EPROM, and now I have 1MB chip, a 1.3 ROM and a reset resident RAD.

Thanks for this crucial tip, I had forgotten all about it and spent an evening scratching my head and trying various things when my RAD always disappeared on reboot. :-)

Edit: and of course it was all in vain, as setpatch R would have been the answer. :-D

[Pentad]

Kick 1.3 was really a minimal recompile of 1.2, with the romboot.library added to allow booting from HD - this was the really new part that arrived in 1.3. Everything is just 1.2 as it came, most bugs included.

I could not disagree more.  I was an actual beta tester for OS 1.3 and it was much more than 1.2 with the HD boot fix.  There were quite a lot of bugs fixed in 1.3 and some real improvements as well.

It has been a long time since I thought about this but the biggest change came in the file system.  It was more robust, it handled minor errors way better than 1.2, disk doctor was finally killed off, and it was more stable.

I used to post my bug reports on BIX at the time.  Good memories!

-P

[guest11527]

I could not disagree more.  I was an actual beta tester for OS 1.3 and it was much more than 1.2 with the HD boot fix.  There were quite a lot of bugs fixed in 1.3 and some real improvements as well.

Note my specific use of the word "Kickstart". Workbench components were indeed redone, but the Kickstart was not. Look at the version numbers...  1.3 brought FFS, but that was  a disk-based component. Even then, the v34 FFS also had a couple of bugs, for example it returned wrong protection bit information for directories.

[Bugala]

@yorgle

I guess they updated "Instant Music" at some point, since when I got my first A500 (1.3 something), it was bundled with Instant Music and as far as i recall, worked fine.