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From: bryce@COGSCI.BERKELEY.EDU (Bryce Nesbitt)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga
Subject: Re: Kickstart in ROM question
Message-ID: <8708291043.AA15076@cogsci.berkeley.edu>
Date: Sat, 29-Aug-87 06:43:33 EDT
Article-I.D.: cogsci.8708291043.AA15076
Posted: Sat Aug 29 06:43:33 1987
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Aug-87 08:10:03 EDT
References: <8708180804.AA27308@cogsci.berkeley.edu> <2253@cbmvax.UUCP>
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Organization: Institute of Cognitive Studies, UC Berkeley
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In article <2253@cbmvax.UUCP> grr@cbmvax.UUCP (George Robbins) writes:
>In article <> bryce@HOSER.BERKELEY.EDU (Bryce Nesbitt) writes:
>>
>> [He wants the best of both worlds... Kickstart in ROM with a disk load
>> option...]
>
> The real question is why bother [having the ability to load a kickstart
> from disk]?  Some ancient and decrepit programs require kickstart 1.1, but
> I'd like to think that future kickstart releases will be sufficiently
> compatible that all you'll need to do is plug in new ROM's.

The real reason for wanting the option of disk-loading Kickstart was given
as wanting to be able to load Kickstart 1.3!  This makes two presumptions,
first that Kickstart 1.3 and _beta_ versions of it will be available on
disk (good assumption), second that Kickstart 1.3 will be 256K long (not so
good).	It seems more reasonable to assume that Kickstart 1.3 beta copies
will hook themselves in with those mysterious "Rom Tags".

It seems a sensible idea if someone would see fit to run an extra address
trace or two to the ROM sockets on the A500/A2000 and twiddle GARY in such
a way that the OS can easily bloat to 512 or more.  Unless someone takes a
sudden liking to assembly over C (besides me), or better yet, rips out that
BCPL kludge that handles the file system, I have a feeling that more than
256K will be needed to do much of anything extra to the ROM part of the OS.

Now if only the schematics in the A500 manual matched the rev of the PC
board... too much to ask for, really.  I had to hack out JP3 (and _EXRAM)
on my own to play with moving the A501 to $080000.  Also had to reverse the
power/drive LED's, but that's another matter.  Anyone have an extra "help"
keycap?  Someone out there must have the complement of my machine... I have
two "del" caps and zero "help" keycaps.  Guess this means I'm "helpless".
:-) :-) :-)

And, with every new release there is _always_ the same problem of
incompatible programs.	Consider the programs that would not work with V1.2
and instead gave a Guru #81000009.XXXXXXXX.  The condition of freeing
memory that was already free was not checked in older Kickstarts.  The
programs had a bug... but it did not show up until the OS was improved.

If you really want to see imcompatibility, add a MMU.  Now Boys and Girls,
are we all using MEMF_PUBLIC for any memory shared between tasks?... I knew
we were.


>Well, [he] could do something if [he] preserved the 2 "bootstrap" ROM's
>when adding the kickstart ROM's but I doubt that he did this.

The current set up this person has uses the two boot ROM's piggybacked, one
switch and some jellybean TTL.	Switch one way, Kickstart in ROM, switch
the other way boots from disk.	It works, but is inelegant.

-----
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