Amiga 1000 QUESTIONS regarding KICKSTART etc....

[Chewieshmoo]

Well I have not even seen an A1000 in person in many years but being the first Amiga I find it interesting.
Please excuse any inaccuracies as I speak only form memory off the top of my head. Now, if I recall Kickstart must be loaded from disk correct? Version 1.2 I am guessing? I know that beginning with the Amiga 500 Kickstart came built in on ROM right? So I guess my questions are:

1. Can higher versions of Kickstart be loaded into an Amiga 1000 or is it only a specific version?
2. Is there any advantage to the 1000's ability to loading kickstart, like loading say a hacked or altered version of Kickstart?
3. Is there anything else that can be loaded into a 1000 instead of kickstart that would allow the 1000 to function different or even emulate a different machine.
4. Can the 1000 be "upgraded" to a kickstart in ROM?


Also, any other plus or minus opinions on the 1000 compared to later Amiga's?

I am just fascinated about the first Amiga and appreciate all responses and comments THANKS!!!!!

[Harrison]

The A1000 is a bit of a limited system these days and is sadly probably the least usable Amiga apart from as an historic curiosity.

Regarding the kickstart, yes the A1000 loads its kickstart from floppy disk. When you switch it on, instead of the hand holding a disk asking for a workbench disk, it instead shows one asking for a kickstart disk. Most people think the reason for this was to allow easy upgrading to newer versions. Whilst this was true the real reason was that the first version was very buggy, so they wanted an easy way to supply fixed versions to retailers and owners later on. The first A1000s came with a very early version of Kickstart starting with 1.0. Commodore continued to release new versions of Kickstart for the A1000, but stopped support at Kickstart 1.3, but that is still good enough for OCS applications and games.

The A1000 was also fairly limited in expansions compared to later big box Amigas. No internal card expansion, and instead just a single 86pin expansion slot which is the same, and therefore compatible with the A500's sidebus slot, and so it could be viewed as the first zorro slot (although the A2000's Zorro 2 slots were the first official ones), but for some reason the A500's expansion port is upside-down relative to the port on the A1000, making it hard to use the same cards/expansions with both the A500 and A1000 systems.

The system is limited to a maximum of 51KB chip ram, plus 8MB fast ram. It originally only came with 256KB of ram on the motherboard, and needed an additional 256KB upgrade using a dedicated cartridge to provide the full 512KB chip ram to make is usable. The designers wanted it to have 512KB as standard by Commodore wanted to reduce costs so halved the installed ram, but obviously all owners had to buy the upgrade to do much with the system. Later A1000's did ship with 512KB already installed.

Something of interest is that the first NTSC models sold in Canada and the US were missing the EHB graphics video mode available in all later Amigas. This means that if you had one of the first NTSC A1000's many games that utilised the EHB mode to generate half brite colours to create a 64 colour palette wouldn't work. EHB first appeared in the first PAL versions of the A1000, and then added to the later NTSC versions.

Regarding loading anything else into the A1000 other than a kickstart disk, I don't know if any developers ever released other disks that could boot alternative OSs into the A1000's 256KB WOM OS kickstart ram space, but I expect there were. There were a couple of arcade games that used A1000 motherboards, the UpScope one being a good example, and these bypassed the kickstart disk completely and added their own rom daughter boards to the motherboard to boot directly from roms into the game, so they definitely used an alternative.

One other thing of note is that the Audio custom chip in the A1000, called Paula, remained the same throughout all Amiga models right up to the A1200 and A4000. It was the only chip never to change. The Agnus for example went though a number of updates to support more chip ram. And in AGA machines all of the other chips changed to different named versions.

[Chewieshmoo]

Well thanks for the awesome replay. Well after a lot of thought I do not think I will pursue a A1000. Interesting but I am in Canada and all Amiga's are rare, even if I find on Ebay most are in UK and shipping / border taxes etc just gets crazy. I was just curious but I think I would be much better off with just about any other model. THANKS.

[Phantom]

If you are a serious collector, a white and mint A1000 is really a nice piece of kit to have. Although as Dave stated, nowadays is not very usable, but it's the only Amiga which has 'ticks' and 'Amiga' on them (no Commodore badges, even on the keyboard), and also it's a historical piece as the case has all the signatures of the developers including Jay Miner and Mitchy (his dog).

[Chewieshmoo]

If you are a serious collector, a white and mint A1000 is really a nice piece of kit to have. Although as Dave stated, nowadays is not very usable, but it's the only Amiga which has 'ticks' and 'Amiga' on them (no Commodore badges, even on the keyboard), and also it's a historical piece as the case has all the signatures of the developers including Jay Miner and Mitchy (his dog).

If money was no object then surely but really though I have a massive collection of consoles and computers I don't consider myself a serious collector, just in it for the fun so I am much more interested in Amiga's I would have fun using. Still kick myself for getting rid of my old A500 and expanded A1200 years ago...........