Kickstart 3.9

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Kickstart 3.9 Information

Kickstart 3.9?

You are not reading that wrongly. However there is no official Kickstart 3.9 ROM released by Commodore, or any other Amiga based companies. Kickstart 3.9 is a custom scene ROM created by the Amiga community for use with AmigaOS3.9.

What is the Point?

This is a good question considering AmigaOS 3.9 boots fine using a Kickstart 3.1 ROM. However when you normally boot an Amiga into AmigaOS 3.9 it has to first run setpatch to add the additional AmigaOS ROM Update for 3.9 from DEVS:, and then the system reboots before actually loading AmigaOS 3.9.

This custom 3.9 ROM removes the Amiga's need to first run the setpatch reboot.

How is this achieved?

The custom 3.9 ROM is built by combining the files from the original Kickstart 3.1 ROM version, with the files from the AmigaOS 3.9 ROM update. And a new ROM is then built which contains both. Therefore allowing the Amiga to boot into AmigaOS 3.9 without first needed to patch the system and perform a soft reboot. Clever, huh?

And the 3.9 ROM can be customised to your own needs. Removing the original scsi.device from the ROM image for example if you don't use the Amiga's original on-board IDE interface and instead adding the device needed for the HD hardware you actually use, such as 1230scsi.device.

How can I make a Kickstart 3.9 ROM set?

You can only achieve this if you have some additional hardware capable of flashing EPROMs. Most people use a Willem EPROM programmer.

The process to make a Kickstart 3.9 ROM set is as follows:

  • Read the contents of your 3.1 ROM chip into an image file.
  • Use Doobrey's Remus to split the resulting image file into the files contained within it.
  • Combine the 3.1 ROM's files with the ones in the newer AmigaOS 3.9 ROM Update. Replacing any older versions from the 3.1 ROM files with the newer ones contained in the 3.9 Update.
  • Remove any files that you won't need, and add any additional ones that you require. As mentioned above, you could remove scsi.device from the rom if you don't use the on-board IDE interface, and replace it with a different file such as 1230scsi.device.
Note: When doing this make sure you keep an eye on the complete ROM size. While your EPROMs might be larger, the Amiga expects to find a 512KB ROM image, so your final total ROM size must remain that size.
  • Insert the final combined files into a new ROM image.
  • Next text the image by BlizKicking (or any other method of softkicking a ROM image).
  • Next copy the ROM image to a Windows based PC and load the image into WinHex
  • Dissect the file Wordwise, and create 2x256 files (so it is split to fit onto the two physical Kickstart EPROMs. Which creates the two files U6A_tmp.bin and U6B_tmp.bin
  • Concatenate U6A_temp.bin to itself to create U6A.bin, with a filesize of 512K and do the same for U6B.
  • Load each image into the Willen programming software, perform a Byte Sap operation on the buffer, and then write each image to the EPROM chips.
  • Install them into your Amiga as you would a normal Amiga ROM and you are finished!
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