@Nonefornow

Quote:

And then, for Pete's sake, why wouldn't OS 3.X be 100% compatible with KS1.3 and WB 1.3? There was a large customer base of A500 users that went out to get the new ROM and OS just to realized that their favorite game was not working. And all the tricks involved (dual KS board, external switches, etc.) to remedy that just put off many users.

That's not Commodores fault, for once, that's the fault of all the game programmers programming it like a C64. There's no practical way to update the Kickstart and have all kernel routines in the exact same place.

They simply shouldn't have called kernel routines direct. And why did they bloody bother to? JSR $FFxxxx against JSR $xx(A6)? Seriously, it's so much faster? When you boot a disk the OS gives you free access to use the IO objects and read in a bit more. Most games killed the OS so I see no reason why they didn't use what the OS provided them and then take over.

The problem Commodore did make is making the OS too open. But that's another story. There were companies like Psygnosis that actively supported 020 so their A500 games did boot on a future A1200. The rest didn't care or were lazy and gamers tended to pirate like crap. Still, these days you see examples like a new Zool only supporting Windows 10, so only one working system supported hasn't gone away and that's not limited by rigid firmware.