10 September 2008, 10:42 | #1 |
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Kickstart substitute
The necessity to buy/dump a kickstart is a nuisance and obstacle to the proliferation of UAE. Kickstart is basically a collection of OS specific libraries that are saved in ROM for historical reasons, just like ibm's bios. (Correct me if I'm wrong.) Pc emulators like qemu come with a free bios, of course.
Frankly, I don't see why it hasn't been done before. The effort to to reimplement (the important parts of) kickstart should be very small compared to uae as a whole. Why should amiga be so different in that aspect? |
10 September 2008, 10:49 | #2 | ||
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It's also more than just "a collection of OS specific libraries", it's the complete Operating System. Quote:
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10 September 2008, 13:23 | #3 | |
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It has, WinUAE contains a basic kickstart replacement which could be backported to the mainline UAE codebase, or more likely to E-UAE. Also there is the AROS project which has a bounty open to create a free, unencumbered kickstart replacement, it may never happen but AROS has surprised most people by how much they have actually achieved. Complexity for one thing (both technical and legal) and the lack of any market potential. |
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10 September 2008, 16:35 | #4 | ||
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It was implemented long time before WinUAE. Quote:
KS3.x "compatible" KS replacement should be possible (get all regular libs from AROS and add 68000 low level assembly routines, like interrupts and task switching) but it requires very low level exec knowledge. 100% KS 1.x game compatible Kickstart replacement is near-impossible. It needs to be bug-by-bug compatible, must use exact same amount of RAM, basically it must be exact same thing or some game will break. Unfortunately AROS bounty is very very complex. First phase should be something like "must boot most bootable games with custom bootblock, no need to support CLI yet". This is already very complex task. (but don't need weird dos.library yet..) I am sure I could do it but it would mean months of really boring work. |
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10 September 2008, 21:48 | #5 |
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Isn't it possible to rewrite exec and the other libraries in C (or whatever aside from assembler)? How much compatibility could you expect from that? I heard of incompatibilities between kick1.3 and kick3.0 due to unclean programming of the applications, of course. Is it really that bad? 100% compatibility is unrealistic even for the most elaborate emulator.
Would the aros bounty face legal issues? To my best knowledge, it is legal to produce substitutes with compatible interfaces. That's why wine is still there. |
14 September 2008, 16:51 | #6 | ||
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Most KS2.x+ compatible applications and drivers don't try to do anything stupid. Quote:
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07 December 2008, 23:09 | #7 |
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09 December 2008, 18:29 | #8 | |
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It was included on the coverdisk of CU Amiga 50 something. I don't think anything came of it legal-wise, no law suits or anything... So maybe Relokick could be packaged with it or incorporated as an option or something? Last edited by J.Tramiel; 09 December 2008 at 19:41. |
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09 December 2008, 20:46 | #9 |
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09 December 2008, 20:56 | #10 |
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The fact that the 1.3 ROM came with ReloKick doesn't affect it's copyright status in any way, distribution without prior written permission from the rights holder is a copyright violation no matter how you obtain the ROM.
Galahad mentioned this as well but at the time I assumed he was joking. Is there any evidence to support this claim? |
09 December 2008, 22:35 | #11 |
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Yeah, I just loaded my adf of Relokick thru workbench and hey presto in the Devs directory is a file called rom1.3
Regarde: Dunno if this is an 'official' Commodore ROM or if it's an 'unofficial' one. (how does one tell?) Just noticed that the filesize is a lot smaller than the 1.3 rom I am using with winuae - maybe compressed or something? (Might try taking it from the adf and using it in WinUAE just for the crack) |
09 December 2008, 22:46 | #12 |
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1.3 kickstart is only 256kb.
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09 December 2008, 23:07 | #13 |
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09 December 2008, 23:13 | #14 |
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Heh I must be using an over-dumped version, mine's 512k.
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12 December 2008, 10:02 | #15 |
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12 December 2008, 17:53 | #16 |
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Just about, overworked and running on autopilot right now
Vaguely back on topic, I might be wrong about CU amiga having permission to include the 1.3 ROM on their coverdisk, from what I've been reading on google groups they *might* have had permission from C= UK, but C= UK didn't have the authority to give them permisson. I'll see if I can jump up in the attic and find my old CU mags. |
12 December 2008, 17:59 | #17 |
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I had a look on AMR and as far as I can tell they never mentioned anything about having permission for it, certainly not in that particular issue.
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13 January 2009, 23:09 | #18 |
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As far as I understand, Cloanto would welcome a kickstart substitute as part of Aros. He even donated for the Kickstart ROM Replacement (Phase I) bounty.
I found some info here: http://www.amigakickstart.com/ http://www.amigaforever.com/kb/13-122 |
17 January 2009, 15:20 | #19 | |
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The only thing I found out about it through Google Groups archive, was that the next months issue had some readers questions asking about the legality of the 1.3 ROM. BTW,wasn't it CU Amiga that also had the complete OS3.1 as 5 adf files on some cover CDs without permission? |
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17 January 2009, 15:37 | #20 | |
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