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From: taab5@isuvax.iastate.edu (Marc Barrett)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.advocacy
Subject: Re: The Amiga's Future
Message-ID: <1991Jun5.104449.14313@news.iastate.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 91 10:44:49 GMT
References: <1991Jun03.053144.3208@ariel.unm.edu> <5202@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> <1991Jun4.200756.9421@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu>,<1991Jun05.010426.21000@zds-oem.zds.com>
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In article <1991Jun05.010426.21000@zds-oem.zds.com>, easton@zds-oem.zds.com (Jeff Easton) writes:
>In article <1991Jun4.200756.9421@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu> es1@cunixb.cc.columbia.edu (Ethan Solomita) writes:
>>In article <5202@dirac.physics.purdue.edu> murphy@gibbs.physics.purdue.edu (William J. Murphy) writes:
>>>In article <1991Jun03.053144.3208@ariel.unm.edu> nwickham@triton.unm.edu (Neal C. Wickham) writes:
>
>>>I just don't get it.  I remember a year ago or so when the A3000 came out.
>>>Didn't it have both 2.0 and 1.3 ROMS?  Although 2.0 ROMs weren't finalized,
>>>Why has it taken C= a year to produce those chips for retrofit into A2000s and
>>>A500s?  Will the entire ECS be available for <A3000 machines?  You would
>>>think that C= would get on the ball.  This is almost getting to be as bad 
>>>as Steven Jobs' NeXT initial announcement.
>>>
>>	Your memory is way off. There are no ROMs in the A3000.
>                                ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>>1.3 and 2.0 are loaded off of the hard drive and run using some
>>magic. The reason is that, as each new bug fix comes in, the OS
>>can be easily updated. 2.0 is being continually updated. When
>>they stop updating it is when you'll see the ROMs. What's the
>>point of coming out with ROMs now that need to be changed in 4
>>months?
>
>  There are ROM's in the A3000 (honestly, I just looked :-).  They are
>not however the kickstart ROM's.  They are a simple bootstrap loader.
>
>  The bigger question is when the Kickstart 2.0 ROM's do come out, will 
>we lose the capability of booting a 1.3 system?  Anyone?

   No, you will not lose the ability to boot AmigaDOS 1.3, at least not 
on Amiga systems (like the A3000) with MMUs.  After you get the 2.0 ROMs,
you will still be able to use SetCPU to boot AmigaDOS 1.3, though you will
have to give up 256K of RAM.

>
>>>Bill Murphy
>
>>	-- Ethan
>
>
>        Jeff Easton               Zenith Data Systems
>     // Systems Engineer 
>   \X/  easton%zds-oem@caspian.cs.andrews.edu
>	easton@andrews.edu	
>   What?  Preemptive Multitasking in only 256K of RAM?  :^)  :^)
>
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