| From: | Neil Bothwick |
| Date: | 18 Aug 2000 at 21:21:54 |
| Subject: | Re: Amiga Piracy |
Nick Lamburn said,
> 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?
Boot from floppy disk, or a backup. Do you have a backup of your ROM? :)
FlashROM or disk based OS makes much more sense from the point of view
of updates and bug fixes.
> Heaven forbid you should delete
> dos.library and trackdisk.device! :))
Basic booting functionality has to be in ROM, for obvious reasons. How
would you load trackdisk.device from disk?
> 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).
There's another limitation of a ROM based OS. Look at the trouble they
had with the A4000T, having to put essential functions on disk anyway so
they could squeeze IDE and SCSI controllers into the ROM.
> 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.
Exactly. Instead of patching buggy software, you can replace it. And the
main cost is development, not manufacturing.
> Personally having vital OS components in some sort of permanent ROM like
> Kickstart is good,
But what do you consider essential? Getting to the early-startup shell
with the hard drive and CDROM mounted should be enough.
Neil
Quote carefully and read all ADMIN:README mails