"Kickstart V1.3"
 

Hey folks,

This may be a stupid question, but in amongst my disks from back in the day, i've come across one titled "Kickstart V1.3". This seems to be a bit weird to me as it's a disk, not a chip. When i load it up in my machine, it seems to boot into a dark grey screen with a prompt to allow you to start typing. I'm not sure for what reason, or what this environment is. I couldn't find any reference to this on the internet, so i'm a bit puzzled.

Anyone have any clues?

I've clearly gone out of my way to have a copy of this as it's my handwriting on the disk from when i was an early teenager. My memory doesn't work well from 30+ yrs ago though.

That's probably for the A1000, which does not have a built-in kickstart, but loads it off-disk. You cannot use it on any other machine.

Maybe its just mislabeled custom boot disk you or someone else made?

I found several floppies like this when I went through my floppies from back then. All labeled in various nonsensical ways..

It might also be a disk to soft-kick Kickstart 1.3 with something like SKick or ZKick that you may have used back then to get games running on your 2.0+ Amiga.

I attempted to take a backup of the disk, and failed. I'll need to use a Greaseweazel on it i guess (getting a Greaseweazel sorted right now actually).

The disk loads up in my A500, as i say, to a dark grey screen and a prompt. I think there was a failure message associated too. I'll have to take a photo and put it up to confirm to you guys.

When i tried to copy it, I noticed from AE that the disk itself is called something like "Relokick" or something. Maybe that's a further clue to someone?

It's maybe an early attempt to go from built in Kickstart 1.3 to a RAM based Kickstart 2, or it's for only Kickstart 2.x machines since it gives you an error message and goes to a grey CLI screen.

Relokick is a tool to softkick 1.3. If your machine is already equipped with 1.3 it will, most likely, show an error message and quit.

If it's Relokick you must click mouse buttons when there is text "rekicking" and full stops one after another (or something like it). If mouse is not clicked it doesn't reboot but stays doing nothing afair. But just for KS2+

Interesting stuff. Sounds like it's not needed for my Amiga then.
A waste of a disk in my case.

It makes me think how much money did I waste in the playground at school purchasing THAT for my Amiga.

Typically the going rate, from memory, was around 50p a disk irrespective of content.

Now, if I can only track down a grown up Mr Archibald, and/or a grown up Mr Manson, I may have to chase them for my money back! :laughing

I'm actually still friends with both of them on Facebook.

So that should be easy then! :agree :bash

Maybe to boot into Kickstart 1.3 on A Kickstart 1.2 Amiga?

What kickstart is your Amiga Rissy?

Kickstart disks from the Amiga 1000 do not boot to a prompt.

My chip is a Kickstart 1.3 already. I took a photo of the result of booting up from this disk last night, but ran out of time to get it sized etc for putting up here. I'll do that tonight to let people see.

Sorry about the delay chaps, but here it is, I finally got around to uploading the photo of the boot error from this disk of mine.

Kickstart 2.0 version of assign which doesn't work on 1.3. Your disk is a softkicker to boot into 1.3 on a 2.0+ machine.

See i thought that, but after scraping it off the disk with GW, and trying it on AF on all platforms, the result is the same for all. Even those running KS2.0...?

Try to run it directly thru WinUAE with an built in A500+ configuration.

Yeah i tried that with ALL Amiga configurations available, and all returned the same result as i get in real life. From memory at least.

I guess you didn't understand the purpose of that disk. It does not contain an operating system or anything else useful. It only contains the Kickstart 1.3 and the software required to downgrade a KS 2.0+ machine to that Kickstart.

Once the disk has loaded it is of no use any more. It has temporarily downgraded your Amiga to KS 1.3 and that's it. Now you remove that disk and press Ctrl-A-A to get the KS 1.3 disk prompt. From there you insert the disk with the software (a game or something) which requires KS 1.3 and does not run on KS 2.0+.

If you do not have such software, the disk is of no practical use for you.

And of course it does not make any sense to run that disk on a KS 1.3 machine.

Why even on the emulator do i get the same error message associated with using the disk (image)?

What is "ASSIGN FAILED returncode 20"?

Surely at that point if I ctrl A-A, it will just boot back to the kick start on the chip again?

Because it's doing the same thing as on real hardware: temporarily softkicking Kickstart 1.3. Once that's been done (or the system is natively 1.3), the error message is a result of the disk not being able to softkick 1.3 on 1.3. It's meant to softkick 1.3 on 2.0.


It means there's an "Assign" command in the startup-sequence of the disk and the command failed with error code 20. As someone above mentioned, that probably means the disk contains a version of Assign from 2.0, which will not work on 1.3 and thus fail with error code 20.


Most softkickers are "reset resident," meaning the system can be rebooted while keeping the softkicked Kickstart in memory. Power cycling the machine will put the system back to the native Kickstart chip.