![]() ![]() You'd be stuck with the Kickstart version you had, but later versions of AmigaOS were a bit flexible with Kickstart compatibility. They were permanently stuck with whatever version of the Amiga OS/Workbench that was current Nobody was thinking about "Operating Systems" back then, especially since many of your applications and all of your games killed the OS as soon as possible. None of this is strange at all: While the Amiga could actually be used as a very powerful and innovative graphics workstation, the vast majority of its owners used it like any other homecomputer was used in the eighties: switch it on, insert a disk, load a game or application - then switch it off again a few hours later. The much more likely scenario was people downgrading their OS, usually via a "Kickstart switcher", because the Kickstart 2.x version their Amiga shipped with wasn't compatible with one of the Games they were trying to run. And if millions of potential customers run version 1.x of the operating system, commercial software vendors will make sure their software works with that version. By the time the Amiga models that had the OS in ROM (A500 and A2000) were released, the first generation of the Operating System had become pretty stable and further 1.x updates only contained improvements not relevant for your average floppy disk only user. In reality, 90% of the Amiga users never needed to upgrade their operating system. This was never an official solution, but there were 3rd party tools to create that kind of boot disk. Updating the Operating System only required you to buy a new set of ROMs and disks, open your computer and replace the old ROMs with the new ones - or have your dealer do that for you, if you didn't want to void the warranty.Īlternatively, you could load a newer version of Kickstart - the part of the OS which usually resides in the ROM chips - from disk and activate it by patching the machine's reset vector and then reset the computer. And it was cheaper - especially for Commodore, because it could manufacture its own ROMs, but not its own RAM. 'Loading' the OS from ROM is obviously a lot faster, especially if your system is initially only supporting floppy disks for storage. These ROMs were socketed, not soldered to the board in all Amiga models. the actual desktop and its utilities - but the kernel, DOS, graphics routines etc. I must be missing something vital about this.Īll later Amiga models come with the core of the operating system stored in a ROM called "Kickstart" - the A3000 is a somewhat special case, but that's not relevant here. Or did they actually sell new ROM chips that you soldered onto your Amiga after removing the old chip? That sounds kind of crazy. It would feel very strange to me to have to slowly load in the OS every fresh boot from floppies and just bypass the fast ROM chip every day. But since the very definition of "ROM" means it cannot be overwritten, doesn't that mean that there was a massive downside to all Amigas except for the very first one, in that they were permanently stuck with whatever version of the Amiga OS/Workbench that was current when the machine (or its used ROM) was manufactered?ĭoes this mean that, as soon as a new version of Amiga OS was released, all Amiga owners had to do the "start with floppy disk" routine, just like A1000 owners, lest they want to use the now outdated built-in ROM version of the OS? If so, it seems like the use of such a ROM was highly limited and almost pointless. It's mentioned that this was done because they had not fully finished the OS at release, and wanted to be able to send updates to existing customers.Īs I understand it, all later Amigas instead had the OS/Workbench on a ROM, so no floppies were needed and it booted up quickly. Instead, you had to put in floppy disks to boot it up, loading in the Workbench and whatnot each time you powered it on. ![]() One of the things he mentions is that, unlike all later Amigas, it has no ROM containing the OS. ![]() In his latest video, "The 8-Bit Guy" on YouTube talks about the original Amiga 1000: ![]()
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