Amiga Kickstart ROMs - History, Information and Downloads History of the Amiga 'Kickstart' ROM The computer, released by in 1985, required a bootable floppy disk named 'Kickstart', which was used to load basic operating system functionality before continuing the boot process from additional disks. This initial boot code would normally have been stored on a ROM chip, allowing for a simpler user experience and less expensive components, but the development team needed more time to finish the software while the hardware had already gone into production. After the Amiga 1000 (A1000), e.g. On models such as the Amiga 500 (A500) and Amiga 2000 (A2000), this functionality was indeed moved to ROM. Even as new ROM versions were released (from v. 3.x), the 'Kickstart' name remained popular to refer to what would be more accurately referred to as the 'Amiga ROM', or the ROM-resident part of the operating system.

As PCs became more popular, the name 'Amiga BIOS' could also be found, although the name 'BIOS' was never used by Commodore/Amiga systems. Amiga Kickstart ROM Files and Amiga Emulators On many emulation systems, 'ROM' is the word used to refer to games. Not so on the Amiga, where a 'ROM' is the original 'Kickstart' operating system code as released by Commodore-Amiga in the 1980s and early 1990s. Amiga games are commonly referred to as or (if you are looking for a specific Amiga game, try and for the game title followed by ' or 'ADF'). Broadly speaking, there are two categories of: those that aim to emulate the Amiga API (operating system functions), such as the project, and those that aim to emulate the hardware at the lowest possible level, such as the and projects. Both approaches have advantages and disadvantages: AROS aimed to be legally unencumbered from the beginning, but never tried to be compatible at the hardware level, while UAE and Fellow are more compatible with the original hardware, but they depend on the original Kickstart ROMs, which are not freely distributable. A hybrid approach (being, but not yet available) would probably bring the best of both worlds, i.e.

Maximum compatibility for software that 'bangs the hardware', as was common in the Amiga days, and a ROM replacement that is completely independent of third-party claims, while also being possibly faster than the original. In addition to the ROM (the 'Kickstart'), all Amiga systems require a set of operating system files (named ' in Cloanto's Amiga Forever) in order to function.

A 'Kickstart ROM' or 'Kick ROM' alone is not enough to boot into a functioning system, although some games and demos come on disks which include minimal operating system (or OS-replacement) functionality. The CDTV and CD³² also require a second ROM (called the 'Extended ROM'). Cloanto's Amiga Forever If you are reading this page, you are probably interested in the best possible way to easily run thousands of Amiga games, which are now available from legal download sites. In this case, one would have to mention the package from Cloanto, which not only tightly integrates with (Win)UAE, (Win)Fellow and AROS, but also includes games, demoscene productions, a search-engine and database, auto-updates, and a lot more. While you might be able to find the individual files online, configuring the emulation is not a simple task, and Amiga Forever makes running a game (or an original Amiga system configuration) as simple as a mouse click, while also helping you find and run more games, and keep the various emulation components up to date.

Sophisticated title authoring features are included for power users, which make it possible to describe and configure Amiga content in a durable way. Cloanto has been an Amiga developer since 1986, and has been officially publishing the Kickstart ROMs and other OS files in Amiga Forever since 1997, which helped keep Amiga emulation legal in difficult years (the topic was ). They even had a license to the Amiga patents. By supporting Amiga Forever you not only get a quality package, but you support the ongoing efforts of a long-time Amiga friend and contribute to the growth of legal Amiga emulation efforts. Downloading Amiga 'Kickstart ROMs' If you are wondering 'Where can I find a Kickstart ROM?' , the short answer is. Different ROMs which are required for the Amiga emulation environment to boot into a functional operating system and then play games and run other Amiga software are included and preinstalled in for Windows.

Amiga 'Kickstart ROMs' for Android On Android systems, installs official Amiga ROMs and some additional disk images in a way that is autodetected by Amiga emulator apps for Android (e.g. UAE4Droid, AnUAE4All, UAE4All2, Omega 500). These are the 512 KB system ROM files (256 KB ROMs won't work on many mobile emulators) to run Amiga OS versions 1.2, 1.3, 2.04, 3.0 and 3.1 in emulated computers like the Amiga 500 and Amiga 1200.

So if you are searching for 'Amiga 500 Kickstart 1.3' or 'kick.rom' or 'kick13.rom', or for a ROM with MD5 hash 192d6d950d0ed3df8031c2, is the answer that is both legal and easy to use, as it requires no manual configuration work. Different Versions of Amiga Forever Amiga Forever comes in different versions: • - A free download for Windows that can play back a lot of Amiga content • - A basic commercial package for Windows, which not only supports the Express Edition content, but also provides unlimited access to all Amiga games and applications that run on the 1. Omega Composer Crack on this page. 3 ROM and operating system (i.e. About 75% of games) • - Includes additional preinstalled content, support for all ROM and OS versions ever released by Commodore-Amiga (1.x to 3.x, including support for, and ), other items of historical interest, and non-Windows software (e.g. ) • - Same content as the Plus Edition, plus two DVDs featuring more than five hours of video footage • - Unlocks the full potential of the best Amiga emulation apps for Android Additional Information Also see: • • • • • • • • • • • Keywords: Amiga, Kickstart, Kickstart ROM, kick, kick rom, kickrom, download, torrent, ROM, Amiga Forever, Amiga ROM, Amiga ROMs, Amiga Kickstart, UAE, WinUAE, Fellow, WinFellow, emulator, emulation, emulators, amigaz, kick13, kick31. Kickstart and Workbench are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Cloanto Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.

Show [Paused] in windowed mode title bar when in pause mode. If statefile is loaded with one or more floppy images that can't be opened: keep fake disk in drive (like previously) and ask for new disk path when missing disk is accessed for the first time. Custom chipset features emulated. AGA FMODE>0 unaligned bitplane. A RAM drive (also called a RAM disk) is a block of random-access memory (primary storage or volatile memory) that a computer's software is treating as if the memory.

Contents • • • • • Performance [ ] The performance of a RAM drive is in general faster than other forms of storage media, such as an,,,. This performance gain is due to multiple factors, including access time,, and type of. File access time is greatly reduced since a RAM drive is (no mechanical parts).

A physical hard drive or, such as,, and must move a head or optical eye into position and tape drives must wind or rewind to a particular position on the media before reading or writing can occur. RAM drives can access data with only the memory address of a given file, with no movement, alignment or positioning necessary. Second, the of a RAM drive is limited by the speed of the RAM, the, and the of the computer. Other forms of storage media are further limited by the speed of the storage bus, such as (PATA),,. Compounding this limitation is the speed of the actual mechanics of the drive motors, heads, or eyes. Third, the in use, such as,,, ext2, etc., uses extra accesses, reads and writes to the drive, which although small, can add up quickly, especially in the event of many small files vs.

Few larger files (temporary internet folders, web caches, etc.). Because the storage is in RAM, it is, which means it will be lost in the event of power loss, whether intentional (computer reboot or shutdown) or accidental (power failure or system crash). This is, in general, a weakness (the data must periodically be backed up to a persistent-storage medium to avoid loss), but is sometimes desirable: for example, when working with a decrypted copy of an file.

In many cases, the data stored on the RAM drive is created from data permanently stored elsewhere, for faster access, and is re-created on the RAM drive when the system reboots. Apart from the risk of data loss, the major limitation of RAM drives is their limited capacity, which is constrained by the amount of RAM within the machine. Multi-terabyte-capacity persistent storage has become commoditized as of 2012, whereas RAM is still measured in gigabytes. RAM drives use the normal RAM in main memory as if it were a partition on a hard drive rather than actually accessing the data bus normally used for secondary storage.

Though RAM drives can often be supported directly from the operating system via special mechanisms in the operating system, it is possible to also create and manage a RAM drive by an application. Usually no battery backup is needed due to the temporary nature of the information stored in the RAM drive, but an uninterrupted power supply can keep the entire system running during a power outage, if necessary. Some RAM drives use a compressed file system such as to allow compressed data to be accessed on the fly, without decompressing it first. This is convenient because RAM drives are often small due to the higher price per byte than conventional hard drive storage. History and operating system specifics [ ] The first software RAM drive for microcomputers was invented and written by Jerry Karlin in the UK in 1979/80. The software, known as the was further developed into a commercial product and marketed by JK Systems Research which became Microcosm Research Ltd when the company was joined by Peter Cheesewright of.

The idea was to enable the early microcomputers to use more RAM than the CPU could directly address. Making bank-switched RAM behave like a disk drive was much faster than the disk drives - especially in those days before hard drives were readily available on such machines. Microelectronics Jacob Milliman Graebel.

The Silicon Disk was launched in 1980, initially for the operating system and later for. Due to the limitations in memory addressing on and computers, a RAM drive was also a popular application on and systems with and on computers with more than 64kB of RAM. Supported a software RAM drive natively in: on systems with 128kB or more of RAM, ProDOS would automatically allocate a RAM drive named /RAM.

Added a RAM drive named VDISK.SYS to (version 3.0) in August 1984, which was the first DOS component to use. VDISK.SYS was not available in 's as it, unlike most components of early versions of PC DOS, was written by IBM.

Microsoft included the similar program RAMDRIVE.SYS in MS-DOS 3.2 (released in 1986), which could also use. It was discontinued in Windows 7. And the DR family of multi-user operating systems also came with a RAM disk named VDISK.SYS. In, the RAM disk defaults to the drive letter M: (for memory drive). Has had a built in RAM drive since the release of version 1.1 in 1985 and still has it in (2010). Added the functionality to the with 's Memory in 1991, and kept the feature through the life of. Users can use the, (or ) and utilities to create, format and mount a RAM drive.

A RAM drive innovation introduced in 1986 but made generally available in 1987 by for was the ability of the RAM drive to survive most crashes and reboots. Called the ASDG Recoverable Ram Disk, the device survived reboots by allocating memory dynamically in the reverse order of default memory allocation (a feature supported by the underlying OS) so as to reduce memory fragmentation.

A 'super-block' was written with a unique signature which could be located in memory upon reboot. The super-block, and all other RRD disk 'blocks' maintained check sums to enable the invalidation of the disk if corruption was detected.

At first, the ASDG RRD was locked to ASDG memory boards and used as a selling feature. Later, the ASDG RRD was made available as shareware carrying a suggested donation of 10 dollars. The shareware version appeared on Disks 58 and 241. AmigaOS itself would gain a Recoverable Ram Disk (called 'RAD') in version 1.3. Many and systems provide some form of RAM drive functionality, such as /dev/ram on, or md(4) on. RAM drives are particularly useful in high-performance, low-resource applications for which Unix-like operating systems are sometimes configured.

There are also a few specialized 'ultra-lightweight' Linux distributions which are designed to boot from removable media and stored in a ramdisk for the entire session. See also [ ].