¶i§1¬3 Kickstart 2.0 ¬2 Written By Twain Pain/Vicious ¬1 §AThis is no review of the latest Kickstart version created by Commodore§1. It is merely a compilation of things which changed when I bought a Kickstart 2.0 ROM chip recently. (I couldn't afford a real A1200, so I decided to just buy a new ROM chip for FL 38,- instead of spending FL 1200,-) ¬3 Don't think that every guy outthere who has an A500 1.3 (that used to be most of all Amiga users) goes immediately out to buy a A1200. There's also something like money, so don't think this article is irrelevant. ¬2 Installing the chip ¬1 The first problem which came up was that this chip should be inserted somewhere inside my beloved Amiga. So using a screwdriver I removed all the screws from the casing. ¬3The Kickstart 1.3 ROM¬1 chip wasn't hard to locate. It is situated somewhere next to the processor (the biggest chip on the board.) Without using a chip-remover (a kind of wrench used to pull chips off the board) I removed the old ROM and inserted the new one. A small notch on the chip shows how it is to be placed in the socket. All went well, no flashes, no lightning, no burned fuses. So I turned my dear friend on again. A red screen and a red flashing powerled ¬3(Yes! Yes! My computer is really old!)¬1 greeted me. Something was obviously wrong. I removed the chip and placed it upside-down in the socket. But that gave no reaction at all. I asked around a bit and it seemed that an ¬3Amiga motherboard, revision 5¬1 or less isn't quite capable of using the ¬2512K Kickstart 2.0¬1 chip. It seemed that you should connect pin 1 (first pin on the left counted from the notch) to pin 31 (somewhere in the middle on the right side. The upper right pin is pin 40 so count back.) After doing so, my Amiga worked! Showing the awful animated disk over and over again! Displaying the new terrible Topaz font! Showing the beatiful gadgets! Ok! ¬2 Running on the chip ¬1 Another problem I encountered was that a certain amount of programs failed to work correctly. For instance: ¬3Diskmaster 1.3¬1 I use ¬2Diskmaster 2.0¬1 now. I guess Diskmaster 1.4 also works on Kickstart 2.0+, but I'm not sure. Opus 4.1 is also pretty cool but 20000 times larger!! ¬3Kefrens IFF-Convertor¬1 As I am a coder and since graphicians don't draw pictures in RAW-format I used to have an IFF convertor at hand. Too bad the easiest to use can't be used anymore. I now intend to use ¬2IFF-Master¬1. ¬3Protracker 1.1b¬1 A very good Protracker-version. Most others are pretty much the same as this version. I started using ¬2Protracker 2.3b¬1 by Noxious now, since this is 2.0 compatible. I don't think I'll ever use Protracker 3.11b, since the only thing it offers more is a Hires screen and some very annoying slider bars!!! Protracker 3.15 is also a big fake! Them guys frum Cryptoburners included a filter-menu but it doesn't work on my version. ¬3Seka 3.2¬1 This pretty old version of Seka does work but tends to fuck up screen output. Use ¬2AsmOne¬1 instead. This works on all machines, looks much nicer, and is still being updated. ¬2 Programming with the chip ¬1 A third problem is coding. As long as you don't use anything too illegal (like assuming Exec-base is always at $C80 or something like that) it will work pretty well. The ¬3Kickstart 2.0+ is easy to detect¬1 by checking the version-number of the Exec-library structure. One thing I immediately noticed is that ¬3Boot-Blocks will be loaded in Fast-Mem¬1 if you have any. I do, so no bootblock of mine worked. But by inserting a copy routine which copies the Boot-Block way into CHIP-memory that problem can easily be overcome. Another small problem is, that when you use a ¬3copperlist¬1 which doesn't set the plane-modulo registers ($108, $10a) to 0, they will be set to a non-zero value resulting in your picture which looks nice on 1.3 being sucked on 2.0. (check Megazin #1. The picture-coding was done in 10 minutes at a party on a 1.3!) One somewhat bigger problem is that ¬3Kickstart 2.0 is autobooting¬1. You can't immediately assume the disk you booted from is DF0:. This version of the Megazin code still assumes that. So if you boot it up from your external drive, the drive will keep running. Annoying but true. I still have a boot-selector. If you set it to boot from DF1, my external and internal diskdrive get swapped so I can actually boot from my external drive being DF0:. But I don't think many of you guys out there running Kickstart 2.0+ are using a boot- selector nor a Revision 5 motherboard.