Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!eecg.toronto.edu!leblanc
From: leblanc@eecg.toronto.edu (Marcel LeBlanc)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.tech
Subject: Why put Kickstart on A3000 ROM? (was Re: 512K FastRam)
Message-ID: <1990Sep1.133213.6765@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>
Date: 1 Sep 90 17:32:13 GMT
Lines: 34

>In article <1990Aug29.203331.25529@agora.uucp>, billsey@agora.uucp (Bill Seymour) writes:
>> In article <1990Aug28.192905.13813@nmt.edu> dksnsr@nmt.edu (Dino Khoe) writes:
>> :My friend recently bought an A3000 and upon setting it up and doing an
>> :avail, it showed the maximum FAST ram to be 512K!  So we checked the chips
>> 
>> 	On the EPROM versions of the 3000 (read that, any 3000 before 2.0
>> has been installed as a ROM) the Kickstart is loaded into memory and
>> executed from there. That makes it easy for you to update differing versions

There's been lots of discussion (read: complaints) about the fact that
Kickstart uses up 512K of RAM on an A3000.  Why is this bad?  If you put
Kickstart on ROM, you have to pay for 512KBytes worth of ROM/EPROM.  I'd
much rather pay for an extra 512K of RAM!  The RAM costs less than the ROM,
and has much faster access times (especially the SC RAM).  Remember that all
A3000 are shipped with at least 50MB of HD space.  There's no need to insert
a Kickstart floppy - and 512K of hard disk space is much cheaper than both
RAM or ROM.  Besides, I expect that most A3000 owners will copy Kickstart to
RAM anyway (using setcpu, or whatever).

It's easy to understand why Kickstart is on ROM in A2000s and A500s, but I
don't understand why you would want to put it on ROM in an A3000 when it's
clearly not necessary.  Every time an OS upgrade comes out, I'll have to
change the ROM to get the new version.  The A3000 is nothing like the A1000 -
it takes very little time to load kickstart from the HD.

So, anybody know why it's been done this way?  It would be nice to know that
Commodore would continue to support HD loaded kickstarts for future OS's for
those who don't want an OS ROM.

Anxiously awaiting the arrival of my A3000-25/50,

Marcel A. LeBlanc  --  Electrical Engg Computer Group, Univ. of Toronto
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