I gave a thought to the kickstart backwards compatibility dilema, and I found a very good solution:
It is as simple as reusing the same old and buggy v40 rom we all know and love&hate. It is despite its shortcomings, a highly compatible rom. My idea is to insert in its build a modified form of the kickmenu module (which was present in those A3000 36.16 roms).
The module provided a way to either boot from itself or to load and soft kick from a file in devs:
I would only modify three things from it:
1. Build the softkick procedure so that it doesnt require a MMU.
2. Change the volume labels of the softkick targets from 1.3 and 2.x to 3.1 and 3.x (Assuming 3.x is this new release)
3. Change the behaviour, so that if the module doesnt find the corresponding kickfile in those volumes, it just continues booting its own rom contents (which is an unmodified v40 rom).
This small change will allow backwards compatibility and an option to softkick a new or wip rom without issues, and out of the box.
The kickmenu module occupies less than 8KB and its sourcecode is provided in the leak, along with sourcecode of well know
CBM softkickers. So it is just a matter of glueing it all together.
