Soft kick Kickstart 3.1?

[Harrison]

My A4000 currently still have Kickstart 3.0 installed.

I've been looking at current prices for 3.1 roms for it and they have all been around £40 which is too much when I already have an A1200 with 3.1 roms.

So instead is it worthwhile soft kicking 3.1 on the A4000?

I'm planning on installed classicWB + KGWHD packs onto a 60GB HD with SFS.

The A4000 has 2MB chip + 16MB fast ram, so I'm assuming soft kicking 3.1 will use up about 512KB of ram? or is KS3.1 1MB?

If there are no real problems with soft kicking 3.1, what is the best software kicker to use?

[Buleste]

I didn't think you could use newer ROMs via the softkick option. If you can then yes it'll take at least 512k of memory.

[Harrison]

Not useful for my A4000, but while looking through the available softkick utilities on Aminet I came across one called BlizzMagic.

BlizzMagic supports A1200 Blizzard accelerators 1230, 1240 and 1260 and allows you to load any kickstart rom into the Blizzard's ROM emulating hardware. It can also move exec.library and related items into fast ram.

Could be useful.

You can find it at http://aminet.net/package/util/boot/BlizzMagic

[premium]

And really import thing, use real A4000 Kick3.1 Images, the Kick3.1 from A1200 doesn´t work. But i guess you know this already.

The A1200 Kick3.1 images doesn´t support the internal IDE from A4000 and some other things doesn´t work.

So if your A4000 did not start from HD after softkicking, this might be the problem.

[Harrison]

Is there a soft kicking utility you can recommend I try with the A4000? I've been looking on Aminet, but there isn't much information given in the readme's for the softkicks.

[woody.cool]

I used SKick with my A1200.
I was able to softkick 3.1 easily, the only problem was, my PCMCIA slot stopped working when in 3.1, but still worked fine if I remain with 3.0.

[Harrison]

Were you using the correct version of kickstart 3.1 rom image? If for example you were using an A500/2000 or A4000 KS3.1 image it might not have had the PCMICIA support included.

Regarding SKick. Is it possible to disable the softkicker during the boot sequence? Or do you have to disable it in the startup-sequence if you need to revert to the real KS rom?

I've also seen a program on Aminet called Kickcontrol which says it is a GUI for use with softkicksers and provides a menu with different kickstarts (kickfiles). It doesn't say which softkick programs it works with though. I thought this could be very useful for the A600 because I could set it up to be able to select between KS1.3 and 2.05 for older software, or to use the real KS3.1 in the A600.

[woody.cool]

I did have the correct ROM version as the internal IDE worked (which doesn't work if you use A500 ROM) and also I double-checked that I had the right ROM image.

As for disabling SKick, you set it to open up the menu, it'll show you a list of all the ROMs you have. If you choose the one that's already in use, it basically does nothing and quits.
You could put this menu right at the beginning of the startup-sequence.

[Harrison]

That sounds exactly what I am looking for. I will give it a try on my A600 later. :)

[woody.cool]

On an A600, you may have problems, unless you have plenty of RAM. Otherwise, you get a yellow screen when trying to softkick.

[Harrison]

My A600 has 2MB Chip and 2MB Fast ram so hopefully it will be OK.