[Coco] [Color Computer] Older site.

[Joel Ewy]

Willard Goosey wrote:
>> Date: Wed, 24 Jan 2007 19:17:46 -0800 (PST)
>> From: Dan Olson <dano at agora.rdrop.com>
>>     
>> I'm not too familar with the inner workings of the 1000, I do have an 
>> external SCSI controller for it (the same as used with the 500) and I 
>> guess I assumed that the ROM had enough smarts to look for a hard drive 
>> before booting off of floppy.... I mean, it's an old computer, but not 
>> that old.
>>     
>
> >From what I understand, they wanted/needed to ship the 1000 before
> Kickstart (the proper boot ROM) was finished.  So, instead, it has a
> small stupid ROM that is only smart enough to load Kickstart off
> floppy.  Once Kickstart is in the WOM (Write Only Memory :) (the
> 1000's special RAM where every other Amiga has ROM) it takes over and
> boots Workbench normally.
>
> Amiga 1000 fanatics will tell you this is a feature, not a bug. :-)
> Indeed, the 1000 port of OSK took advantage of this to load *itself*
> into the WOM -- even on a machine with no regular memory protection
> it's unlikely for the WOM to get trashed.
>
>   
I also have an A1000 and two A500s.  While the Kickstart floppy / WOM
could be a feature, it turns out that the WOM is too small for the Amiga
OS 2 Kickstart image, which means you have to go through all kinds of
contortions to get 2 running on the 1000.  There was some kind of patch
that let you run the ver. 2 kickstart from regular RAM, but only once
you've booted 1.3.  Or you can build yourself a Kickstart (EP)ROM
board.  And I think I've even looked at a project to expand the WOM,
which is not trivial.  But other than the Kickstart issue, I like the
1000 much better than the 500.

Now I'd love to play with OS-9 on the Amiga.  I wish that were available
somewhere...
> ...