@Uitgang

This is even better news for sure!!!!

@Rob

Thanks for stating the facts Rob. They speak for themselves.

Hyperion has over the years always worked with any serious party wishing to license 68K Kickstarts "as is" for their products or the 68K community including Individual Computers and AmigaKit.

So nothing new there.

What is interesting about these new Kickstarts, is the fact that Olaf Barthel (Olsen), the only guy who was actually part of the AmigaOS 68K development team back in the Amiga Technologies days and is still around as part of the AmigaOS 4.x development team, recompiled and reassembled the components to squeeze them back into the limited sizes available at the time fixing certain annoying bugs.

This may sound trivial but this is not the case and I doubt it is something that many people could pull off.

Technical details Olsen can provide and did already provide to a some extent in one of the earlier posts.

Last edited by Hyperionmp on 15-Oct-2016 at 12:48 AM.

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@Hyperionmp

Any chance for Kickstart ROM:s (hardware that is). For Amiga 1200 etc.

@Nicsoft

Do you mean like physical ROM chips?

I have no idea if it is possible to still produce these.

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@Hyperionmp

Of course it is. There are tons of new EPROM based new kickstart chips on sale every year. Amigakit sell them for example.

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Amiga A1200, 3.1 ROMs, Blizzard 1230 MKIV 64MB & FPU, 4GB DoM SSD, Workbench 3.1

@A1200

Yep the software development side of it hasn't changed substantially since the 70s. In fact, since the kickstart images are made to run at a specific address which is the same as the originals, it should be a simple matter of giving the file to the ROM burning software and pushing "go". That's why I was thinking that Jens might be interested.

Just bought both of them. 17.91€

I used twice that much money to burger king today.

@utri007

Quote:

I used twice that much money to burger king today.

another not very wise decission..;)

@utri007

I too purchased both. I did not however eat at Burger King.

Drewlio77

@Hyperionmp

Quote:

Hyperionmp wrote: @Nicsoft Do you mean like physical ROM chips? I have no idea if it is possible to still produce these.

Yes, of course. Updated ROM chips and an updated AmigaOS 3.1 (WB) is what could make me interested in investing in my Amiga 1200.
It's already equipped with a HD, 68030 (50 Mhz), scandoubler/flickerfixer, network-card etc. And yes Kickstart ROM:s can be produced...

For sale here (my locale dealer):
http://www.ggsdata.se/index-en.php?page=Datorer/amiga-en.php

And:
http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?products_id=62
http://www.amiga-shop.net/Hyperion-Entertainment:.:18.html?MODsid=dc67b886b1501be67d3b6883ce4fc803
http://www.vesalia.de/e_kickstart.htm

And so on...

Last edited by Nicsoft on 15-Oct-2016 at 11:21 PM.

@Hyperionmp

A600 and A1200 can use 1mb roms without any modification. Kickstart wich has updated scsi.device and fast file system is life saving.

All my A1200 Computers has selfmade 1mb kickstart.

Bought !

The ongoing issue with squeezing code into ROMs - is this due to a 512K limit? Perhaps it is time to draw a line in the sand and increase the required ROM size to 1MB?

I am absolutely no expert on ROM sizes so ended up looking at this helpful chart from Cloanto:

https://www.amigaforever.com/kb/15-127

It appears the 500/600/1200 can support 1MB ROM, but A3000/4000 cannot? Is this true? Maximum 512KB on A3000/4000?

Assuming A3000/4000 could support 1MB I would suggest at some point that is the new minimum ROM size.

Cloanto has done some work creating their "OS3.X" ROMs which is cool, however all they appear to be doing is assembling updated libraries - not doing any actual code updates.

To me this newer 3.1 distribution would only make sense if:
- the ROM size is upgraded
- the newest debugged libraries are installed
- we start setting newer bug fixes and other enhancements (i.e. signs of life)

I have an A3000 that I would like to install an up to date 3.1 distribution on. I would happily buy newer ROMs.


EDIT: Did some more digging. Yes A3000/A4000 have 512MB limit. Looks like need to use a "ROMY" add-on board to enable 1MB ROM on A3000/A4000. Seems pretty simple.

Last edited by gregthecanuck on 16-Oct-2016 at 05:09 AM.
Last edited by gregthecanuck on 16-Oct-2016 at 05:08 AM.

@gregthecanuck

Quote:

gregthecanuck wrote: The ongoing issue with squeezing code into ROMs - is this due to a 512K limit? Perhaps it is time to draw a line in the sand and increase the required ROM size to 1MB?

The limitations are there, but we haven't exercised all the options yet.

For example, I could conceive a 512K ROM which contains compressed code which is decompressed at system startup time. Decompression would begin after the Exec coldstart code and expansion.library initialization have succeeded, possibly as part of expansion.library itself, because it sets up the AutoConfig RAM.

Maybe this might be a workable solution, but it has its drawbacks, too. The decompression would require some memory and probably not work too well on machines with 1 MByte of RAM and a slow CPU. System startup time, from reset/powerup to Workbench, might be a few seconds longer.

Because the operating system would be decoded into RAM, any RAM defects would affect system stability very early on, preventing the system from even reaching the S:Startup-Sequence stage. Instead of crashing after Workbench has opened and the first few applications have been started, it would crash at a time when it's difficult to diagnose the problem, or even produce debug output.

But all of this is still conjecture and would benefit from some more evaluation and testing, if it were considered a viable solution to the size limit problem.

Bought !

@olsen

You have some good ideas in there.

Going from my own experience, sometimes it just isn't worth the effort to make things backwards compatible at some point. The time you spend to make the update worth it for a small percentage of clients unable to move on to 1MB takes away from other more useful/needed enhancements and (I'm guessing) the larger majority of current (and future) purchasers.

I expect the largest demand by far going forward will likely come from the new FPGA users (Vampire) and Jens new hardware - both of which can support 1MB ROM images.

For those users stuck on 512KB machines give them a deal on upgrades that make them 1MB compatible. Subsidize them even. It depends on how the cost/benefit works out.

In my case we had a couple of clients on an older version of UNIX that started causing us more and more pain. Eventually we paid them to upgrade their servers - it saved us money on porting, compiler licensing fees, testing time, documentation, etc...

Cheers!

@Hyperionmp
@olsen

Bought!
Thank you for continuing to work on OS4 too which I much enjoy using. I'm looking forward to X5000/040.

@Amigo1

Quote:

I'm looking forward to X5000/040.

Same here with money burning a hole in my pocket.

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Amiga! "Our appeal has become more selective"

@Beans & Amigo1

Same here

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AmigaOS 4.1 FEu2 on Sam440ep-flex 800MHz 1GB RAM
C128, A500+, A1200, A1200/40, AmigaForever 2008+09+16, 5 x86/x64 boxes
Still waiting (or dreaming) for the Amiga revolution...
m4rko.com/AMIGA

@Thread

If this new Workbench + Kickstart release does not introduce support for the main classic FloppyDisk to TF card readers as if they were native, an internal WB TCP-IP Stack, IDE Hard Disks support cleaned from bugs with robust Filesystem updated to support big dimensions disks, and in the end complete support for USB devices, I think I will pass this turn...

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"When the Amiga came out, everyone [at Apple] was scared as hell." (J.L. Gassée, former CEO of Apple France and chief of devs of Mac II-fx, interviewed by Amazing Computing, Nov 1996).