Amiga questions you've always been too embarrassed to ask

[NLS]

Yes.
For workstation Commodore marketed A4000 (and some PC models).

[Jope]

BIOS battery.. :-) The Amiga only has a real time clock battery. Let's not use the BIOS acronym with Amigas at all..

The only Amigas that use the clock memory for storing some settings are the A3000 series machines, which remember some SCSI settings in a few extra bits of the real time clock.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by CrazyPepsi

But why not a bios battery for the A1200
was amiga 1200 meant to be fun and play ..and not a work station ??
hmmmmm

Maybe because it doesn't have a BIOS?

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Maybe because it doesn't have a BIOS?

True, but it does have a kickstart which does some the same tasks as a PC BIOS. It doesn't need a battery though as it has no persistent configurable settings.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by demolition

True, but it does have a kickstart which does some the same tasks as a PC BIOS. It doesn't need a battery though as it has no persistent configurable settings.

Whilst they're similar in some ways, I'd argue that the kickstart is completely different to a BIOS.

A BIOS is used to boot an operating system. The kickstart is an operating system.

[demolition]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

A BIOS is used to boot an operating system. The kickstart is an operating system.

True - exec.library contains many of the core OS functions and since it resides in the KS ROM, it would only be fair to call it the OS. It handles task scheduling, memory allocation, file system operations etc. which you will not find in a BIOS.

[NLS]

Potato, potato.

Just kidding. But I am sure everybody here knows the difference between BIOS and Kickstart.

[Jope]

Thank you console emulator writers for making:
- people call any kind of firmware a bios
- people call any kind of image of a removable media a rom

[malko]

Originally Posted by Jope

Thank you console emulator writers for making:
- people call any kind of firmware a bios
- people call any kind of image of a removable media a rom

Good point @Jope

[NLS]

Fact.

Although the problem may stem from elsewhere.

1) When emulators started to be more popular (i.e. C64 emulators for Amiga don't count), PC was mainstream, so "BIOS" was already the popular name for their firmware (and same for Linux machines which are still PC hardware most of them).

2) For "roms" the problem was the lack of a better GENERIC name by (us? ) experts (in contrast to "firmware" for well... firmware). I am still waiting for a nice simple name that can fit all, same for C64 floppies, Sinclair tapes, NES cartridges etc.
There must be something better than "roms" but I haven't heard it yet.

[Daedalus]

How about "images"? ROMs makes perfect sense when talking about cartridges, since it's literally a dump of the cartridge's ROM. It's too late now of course to change language like that, but if you could, image would work for me: disk images, tape images, ROM images etc...

[Jope]

Yeh, this war is lost, these days I most often just sigh quietly and move on with my life. :-D

[Hewitson]

Call me picky but it drives me nuts whenever someone asks for Amiga "roms". Of course, these people are very rarely looking for a Kickstart ROM.

[daxb]

Yes, it is a bit strange. Last year I started with RetroPie and got confused what is called a ROM.

[AmigaHope]

Originally Posted by NLS

Fact.

Although the problem may stem from elsewhere.

1) When emulators started to be more popular (i.e. C64 emulators for Amiga don't count), PC was mainstream, so "BIOS" was already the popular name for their firmware (and same for Linux machines which are still PC hardware most of them).

2) For "roms" the problem was the lack of a better GENERIC name by (us? ) experts (in contrast to "firmware" for well... firmware). I am still waiting for a nice simple name that can fit all, same for C64 floppies, Sinclair tapes, NES cartridges etc.
There must be something better than "roms" but I haven't heard it yet.

1) Well, the C64's kernal ROM is basically a BIOS. Initialization routines plus a bunch of low level routines that single-tasking software can call to interface with the hardware. Remember in the MS/DOS days the BIOS didn't just launch the OS, software would actually directly call routines in the BIOS (this is why a fully cloned BIOS was a big deal for Compaq, etc, because otherwise software wouldn't be 100% compatible).

2) How about "software image" as a catch all term. It's an image of a ROM, a floppy, tape, or whatever, but it's all software since it's loaded and unloaded from the system in normal use (vs. firmware which lives in the system permanently or semi-permanently in the case of flash-based firmware).

[slaapliedje]

Originally Posted by AmigaHope

1) Well, the C64's kernal ROM is basically a BIOS. Initialization routines plus a bunch of low level routines that single-tasking software can call to interface with the hardware. Remember in the MS/DOS days the BIOS didn't just launch the OS, software would actually directly call routines in the BIOS (this is why a fully cloned BIOS was a big deal for Compaq, etc, because otherwise software wouldn't be 100% compatible).

2) How about "software image" as a catch all term. It's an image of a ROM, a floppy, tape, or whatever, but it's all software since it's loaded and unloaded from the system in normal use (vs. firmware which lives in the system permanently or semi-permanently in the case of flash-based firmware).

That's exactly what I was going to say, 'Images' that's more of a catch all. But ROMs mostly came I think from MAME, which they are technically ROM rips. Until they started doing CHDs for compressed hard disk images. Now of course they merged MESS and MAME, so it handles all the things.

[jolly11]

what's the name of this hard disk?

[Gordon]

2.5" IDE Hard Drive

[chb]

Could be a Gigatron Arriba 500 (internal 2.5" IDE hard disk, controller in CPU socket):
http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adco...a&pg=4&lang=en

Or any other controller that fits into the 68000 socket. There were a few (MTEC Megabody is another example).

But your image really isn't very clear unfortunately.

[jolly11]

Originally Posted by chb

Could be a Gigatron Arriba 500 (internal 2.5" IDE hard disk, controller in CPU socket):
http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adco...a&pg=4&lang=en

Or any other controller that fits into the 68000 socket. There were a few (MTEC Megabody is another example).

But your image really isn't very clear unfortunately.

thanks..I know but the image was on a magazine and it was very small..
the advertise says "probably the smallest 20mb hard disk in the world; it fits internally on your amiga 500; autoboot with kickstart 1.3; autoparking; compatible with adspeed accelerator"