Ever since the A1000, one of the features we were attracted to and were promised, was that we could easily change the personality of our Amigas. Effectively turning them into very different machines. Commodore pretty much totally ditched that concept and betrayed us all by marketing machines with Kickstart in ROM. So you save a few seconds bootstrapping your machine with ROMS - big deal. The way I see it, had Commodore stayed true with the Amiga teams original design, things could have gotten REAL interesting.

I guess what I am asking is this... besides some of the modern Kickstart patches and hacks, has anyone ever bothered to write a totally new and non-Commodore type "Kickstart"? Of course, this would mean using a totally different OS. Perhaps ST, Mac and PeeCee emulation would have been easier to swallow and more accessible to the masses.

And before I get too far ahead in my reasoning, isn't all of this possible? 256k-512k surely would have been enough room to play around with. At the time, all of the above mentioned platforms BIOS chips were typically even smaller than either of those figures.  

So why hasn't the concept of a Kickstart on disk (or chips for that matter) been fully realised? Speed and ease of use emulating other platforms could have been so much better and Commodore could have marketed the Amiga as a true chameleon of sorts instead of wasting all that time and money marketing a PC-10, etc.  :idea:

Licensing this stuff could not have been more expensive than the resources it took to create standalone clones, could it?

Purely for the sake of argument, lets say you inserted a Kickstart disk that told the Amiga it was really an AtariST. Kind of a TOS written for the custom Amiga chips/drives, and other I/O functions. You would then be able to insert a REAL Atari GEM disk and away you go. This scenario would save you the hassle of configuring an ST system AFTER Workbench was loaded and hypothetically speaking, grant you greater compatibility and speed since you are not converting ST functions to Amiga - at a Commodore Kickstart or Workbench level. Not to mention, the time saved loading Workbench and then the emulator. Perhaps my reasoning is flawed or impractical  :-)

Early Commodore (or perhaps otherwise) marketing stated there was going to be much more made out of the Kickstart disk system. It certainly helped users make the transition from various Kickstarts a lot easier since they did not have to open up their computers and mess around with chips. Huge benefit for Commodore when dealing with the common end users.

Not trying to start a flame war here, just asking why more wasn't done to take advantage of Commodores awesomely flexible Kickstart architecture. 3rd party companies I would think, could have really exploited that, I would think.

Kind of like how you can turn your TI-99/4A into a Myarc computer system by installing a "simple" card into the PEB.

If it's true that Commodore only did the Kickstart on disk thing because the current Kickstart was so weak at launch and was all just a bad design, well... lol   they must have digressed with the A3000 then  :-)  

I guess my reasoning is flawed if you wouldn't have been allowed to have access to sourcecode Amiga<>Atari for their custom chips, etc. But that could have been ironed out through licensing. If not, how would original software be more incompatible due to no emulation? As an end user, I don't see how it's easier running emulation on top of and after Workbench. And we're all familiar with the incompatibilities of emulating. Especially when the MHZ (or lack of them) really count. I was just thinking emulation would/could have been more practical had it been written on and for more of a hardware level than software.

I'm sure I'm out of my league here and don't fully understand the politics and architecture of it all, just asking the "what ifs" and "why nots".

I'm sure there might be obstacles. But the idea has benefits. As for Atari ST (or MAC) on Amiga. Without hardware emulation one could simple make a TOS API wich uses the Amiga hardware. Or even Amiga libraries.

And then there's the project to make a free Kickstart clone
(to kick Amiga Inc leash )

Methuselas wrote:

Quote

freqmax wrote:

And then there's the project to make a free Kickstart clone
(to kick Amiga Inc leash )

Now this is what I'm wondering about most. It's a fair assumption that most of the ROMs nowadays are burnt EPROMs, but why hasn't anyone started designing a new kickstart replacement?? That, right there would be the most of use "classic" item.

Because the ROMs are copyright to AMIGA inc and no one is allowed to copy, sell or reverse engineer them without their permission. It is why you have to buy AMIGA forever to get the emulation with the ROM images. Clonato have a license to sell them.

It is perfectly legal to clean room reverse engineer them, the patents are long gone, there are no trade secrets anymore.  It is not legal to copy them or directly use their code since that would break copyright, which lasts 50 years.  It is not legal to call them Amiga since the trademark belongs to somebody else.

There was a different set of Diagnostic Kickstart roms made for the A1200 I believe. I have seen them for sale before. I almost bought a set just out of curiosity but I sold my A1200.