WHDload - the evil kick 34.005

[Solderbro]

Is there something evil inside the kickrom 34.005? Had installed WHDload 17. on my Kick 2.1 A600 and it did work well with all kickroms in the folder.

Way to chaos: Installed a Kick3.1 in the A600, put a new CF with fresh WB3.1 on it. Installed WHDload latest complete with installer, put the key into s:. Copied the devs:kickstart from the old CF card to the new.

Result: All games requiring kick34005.a500 won't load anymore, after some second of dark night 'kickrom invalid' appears.

Workaround: Dived into my cloanto Amiga Forever, digged the 34.005 and placed it with rename into the devs:kickrom/ folder.

Result: Same as above, kickrom invalid.

-rw-r--r-- 1 eric eric 262155 Jun 24 16:32 kick34005.a500
-rw-r--r-- 1 eric eric 52 Jun 24 16:32 kick34005.A500.PAT
-rw-r--r-- 1 eric eric 4020 Jun 24 16:32 kick34005.A500.RTB

Have no clue what's going on with that special kickrom, because the others run pretty well. Most times WHDload will use the 34.005.

[DanyPPC]

Is it an original Kick 3.1 (40.063) or a Kick 3.x (Cloanto) rom ?

[jotd]

Probably file corrupt due to transfert speed issue.

[patrik]

Run a checksum on it and compare with: https://cloanto.com/amiga/roms/

[BastyCDGS]

Originally Posted by Solderbro

Result: Same as above, kickrom invalid.

-rw-r--r-- 1 eric eric 262155 Jun 24 16:32 kick34005.a500

The file size indicates an encrypted ROM. Should be 262144 bytes instead.

Workaround:
Create A500 config with access to transrom using the above file as ROM image and include the keyfile from Cloanto.

Then use transrom in order to dump the ROM, the resulting file will have correct size.

[DamienD]

Does Cloanto not provide original KS ROMs along with their encrypted one?

[Arnie]

All of the roms by cloanto have requested a rom key, so I would guess the answer is no

[DamienD]

Seriously, you don't also get the original Commodore ROMs (and Workbench .ADFs) in their bloatware package?

Oh well, luckily Google is there (and free)

[BastyCDGS]

Originally Posted by Arnie

All of the roms by cloanto have requested a rom key, so I would guess the answer is no

I really don't get it, why they are encrypting the ROM's at all?
It doesn't make any sense, when the decryption key is delivered with the ROM.

All it causes is a complete unneeded decryption step wasting CPU time for nothing and drive space. Since normal kickstart sizes are aligned to a power of two, this matches perfectly a multiple of the block size of the underlying disk device.

Adding 11 bytes for the crypto stuff will allocate 512-32768 bytes of unnecessary space (depending on block size of file system) for each encrypted ROM image.

So I recommend get rid of all encrypted kickstart ROM's asap and convert them to unencrypted ones.

As you see, they cause all sort of hassles.

[Solderbro]

Yes this is solved, was a compressed kickrom. Found the 262144 one and it was accepted for old games.

Thx