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-
- NOTES for using the SKick program on an Amiga A1200 machine
- ===========================================================
-
- These notes were written after debugging SKick to operate correctly on the
- A1200 machine.
-
- Skick was debugged on a plain A1200 with following configuration:
-
- - CPU 68020, no FPU, no MMU
- - 2 Meg Chip RAM, no other RAM
- - 80M Maxtor Hard Drive supplied by GVP
-
- On this machine, two troubles have occured against the A500/600.
-
- 1) OS 3.0 normally allocates its supervisor stack from the top of Chip RAM, if
- no Fast RAM is available. This prevents SKick from loading the kickstart to the
- top of RAM, and it is loaded 1/2M below, instead. This causes RAM fragmentation
- and decreases the largest available block size. To avoid this problem, RELSTACK
- option has been added to the SKick. When active, this option allocates new
- space for the supervisor stack from the public memory and moves the stack to
- this new place, finally freeing the original memory and making it available for
- the kickstart.
-
- 2) When loading kickstarts not designed for A1200, they will not support the
- A1200 specific hardware like HD, PCMCIA etc. It is the case of the 1.3 sys-
- tem. In this case, only the diskette drives will be usable. No simple way
- exists to solve this problem, only to write new devices support for the obso-
- lete OS. A1200 hardware hasn't the form of expansion boards, it is simply a
- part of its ROM, so there is not a possibility to transfer the hardware support
- to the RAM kickstart like in a case of a standard expansion board.
-
-