| From: | Nick Lamburn |
| Date: | 18 Aug 2000 at 15:23:34 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
Hi
>>> NB Not only Microsoft. But using the ethernet card is a bad idea. They
>>> are NB cheaper than most shareware programs and can be changed easily.
>>> whereas NB a serial number in the computers ROM stays fore the life of
>>> the NB computer.
>
>> Now I find that to be a very surprising statement to be coming from an
>> Amiga person of your stature. Hands up all those who have upgraded their
>> ROM's in the life time of thier miggy's.
Um, yes there's me, and have done a lot, in an A500 (a friends in the day of
the 2.1 upgrade kit (2.04 rom)), A500+ to 3.1, A600 to 3.1, A1200T to 3.1
and lastly a new rom for an A2500 because it was (the original 1.3 ROM)
damaged in a almost fatal accident. (I kiled the ROM and A2630..., though
it's back with a 1.3 ROM and 2620, up in the loft ;)
Oh and add the A3000 will be having a ROM change soon.... :)
> How many more A1200 owners would have bought OS 3.5 if it hadn't
> required a ROM change? More importantly, how much more of the OS could
> have been upgraded if it hadn't been committed to silicon?
Interesting point. I have to say here that I am a happy owner of just
Workbench 3.1 on my 1200T (with the rest being a mix of 3.1 again, 3.0, 2.1
and 2.04, 1.3 and 1.2 :) , and don't personally see OS3.5 as a essential
purchase atm. The main problem for me was that the whole 1200T system was
very touchy on a 3.0 ROM system, requiring kludges to get the PPC and Ateo
Bus working nicely together, and Picasso 96 etc. So regardless of the ROM
upgrade, i'd be in the same posistion as now. Besides 3.1 is a lot better
than 3.0 stability wise.
As for what could have been upgraded if things like graphics.library,
intuition.library, layer.library etc., it's difficult to say. The only
things that could have been really possible in the tim frame were bug fixes
for 68K. PPC versions would have taken longer to code, because it's all in
68K Assembler (and afaik, BCPL was finally obliterated in dos.library). One
of the most potent things for PPC support would have been improvements to
graphics.library and layers.library.
However, having OS vital components in ROM is favourable in my opinion
because it means unless you spill coffee on your kickstart, you can really
fubar your WBench install, but still have a machine that works (unless you
have a superkick A3000 and no superkick disk :). If say you deleted
icon.library and intuition.library from your LIBS: directory, how would you
solve that if it was all disk based? Heaven forbid you should delete
dos.library and trackdisk.device! :))
As it seems to me, the soft kick option is best in this case, i believe Bliz
Kick and patch new libraries into a ROM image, so long as the ROM is not
over 512KB (though you could hack to 1MB if you use that extra bit of 512KB
in the Amiga's 24bit address space).
Given the time H&P had, a ROM upgrade, or recoding some OS vital libraries
would have been a very tough task, though bug fixes wouldn't have been too
much of a problem for them.
Personally having vital OS components in some sort of permanent ROM like
Kickstart is good, then a Flash ROM should be supplied to add to that core
ROM, so components such as GUI (Intuition in Amiga's case) can be upgraded
easily.
Bit of a sidetrack what I've just written :)
Regards
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