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Can I use another Kickstart than the builtin?

First let's drop some words on the Kickstart's Copyright: This belongs to Commodore, you must not use Kickstarts, without the right to do it! Especially it isn't allowed to make an image of anyone else's Kickstart and run this on your own Amiga. (I even doubt that it is allowed to do this on your own Amigas, if you have more than one.)

But of course it is possible and allowed for some people, developers for example. There are two different ways, a hardware solution and a software solution. The former is to buy a card which can hold two or more Kickstart ROMS and allows to select between when the System is booting.

The software solution needs a program (softkicker) and an image of the ROM. The softkicker allocates RAM, loads the ROM image into the allocated memory and reboots. Of course you have less RAM after the Reboot: 256Kb when running Kickstart 1.2 or 1.3 and 512Kb for Kickstart 2.0 or higher.

There are different Softkickers, some of them needing a MMU (see section What are the 68EC020 and the 68EC030?). A nearly perfect solution seems to be kick13 (Aminet, directory `util/misc') because it has the ROM image included. (With Commodores agreement!) For newer Kickstarts I recommend SKick 3.43 (Aminet, directory `os20/util') because it doesn't need a MMU and supports many different Kickstarts. It is rather easy to create the ROM image using the following program: 

    #include <stdio.h>

    #define kickorig 0xf80000   /*  0xfc0000 for Kick 1.2 und 1.3   */
    #define kicklen  0x080000   /*  0x040000 for Kick 1.2 und 1.3   */

    void main(int argc, char*argv[])
      { FILE *fh;

        if ((fh = fopen("kickstart.file", "w"))  !=  NULL)
          { result = fwrite(kickorig, kicklen, 1, fh);
          }
        fclose(fh);
      }

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