23.Oct.2015
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Kickstart 'ROMs': 3.X ROM chips from Cloanto
An increasing number of vendors is offering so-called "3.X ROMs" that can be built into all Amiga models except the A1000. Since a big German dealer recently started distributing these and we're receiving inquiries regarding these Kickstart ROMs, we approached Mike Battilana from copyright holder Cloanto and asked for additional information.
For quite some time, Cloanto has been offering a license to dealers for building their own Kickstart ROMs. The dealers receive ROM images and designs for the labels and then produce their own chips. To keep the costs down, PROMS or EPROMS are used instead of actual ROM chips. Smaller vendors from Poland or Spain have been the first licensees, but by now the bigger and more well known dealers are becoming interested in offering the new ROMs aswell.
Cloanto is offering this deal for an entire range of ROM versions, like all the ones highlighted in green in Cloanto's overview of all Kickstart releases, but dealers seem to be mostly interested in stocking the most recent version labeled "Kickstart 3.X".
The "3.X" moniker has been used in Amiga Forever for quite some time, it describes a Workbench 3.1 setup that has been updated with more recently released modules Cloanto licensed from various developers. The new Kickstart can easily be identified by looking at the copyright notices, which have been changed to read "Cloanto":
The other changes in Kickstart 3.X are listed in Cloanto's official FAQ:
- Patches originally released under the ESCOM and Gateway Amiga ownership (no SetPatch or reboot required)
- scsi.device and exec.library updates by Alexander Benedictov, Chris Hodges, Heinz Wrobel and Toni Wilen
- expansion.library fixes by Jeff Weeks
- FastFileSystem fixes by Etienne Vogt
- mathieeesingbas.library fixes by Harry "Piru" Sintonen
Kickstart 3.X makes it possible to use more than the first four gigabyte of a hard disk drive, but that requires a more recent release of Workbench/AmigaOS aswell - i.e. one containing FastFileSystem version 45.9 or newer, amongst other things.
To create the additional space required for the updates, the workbench.library had to be removed from the ROM - it has to be loaded from disk now. Cloanto's own Workbench distributions are prepared for this, AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 also feature a separate workbench.library on disk. (cg) (Translation: cg)
[News message: 23. Oct. 2015, 18:54] [Comments: 0]
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