jacc@midas.UUCP (Jac Colby) (01/09/87)
Only wholesome, 100% natural line eater food, no preservatives added ...
I recently purchased and installed a ROM kit that eliminates the
Kickstart disk and also adds 1/4 meg of memory. I am very pleased
with the way it works and consider it a very good price/performance
buy.
The $129 product is called "Kickstart Eliminator and Ram
Expansion Kit". It is made by Creative Microsystems Inc., of
Portland, OR., and it does just what the name says. With it
installed, your Amiga uses NO Kickstart disk and has an extra
1/4 meg of fast memory.
The kit contains 4 ROM's, a new PAL, sockets for these, a few
jumper wires, 1.2 Workbench disk, and an instruction manual.
Following rather well laid out and easy to follow instructions,
you take your Amiga apart and modify the Writable Control Store
(WCS) board and the main board. These modifications are simple,
but they do VOID your 90 day Warranty. On the WCS board, you
remove the WCS address PAL and replace it with a socket and new
PAL supplied by Creative Microsystems, and add a jumper. On the
main board, you add two sockets and ROM's, replace the original
two ROM's, add one or two jumpers, and cut one trace. (Holes for
the ROM sockets exist, but you have to remove the solder to
install the sockets). All of this took about two hours. It
requires the use of soldering iron and solder-sucker. No great
skill is required (I'm a software type), but if you have not used
a soldering iron on circuit boards before, find a friend who has
to help you.
The 1/4 meg does NOT autoconfigure; you must run "AddMem" as part
of your startup sequence. Personally, I don't mind having to
modify the startup sequence on each bootable disk, but this could
be a serious problem with some copy-protected disks.
So far all the software packages I have tried work fine; this
includes Deluxe Paint I & II, Aegis Images, Draw, and Animator,
Aztec C, Emacs editor, Kermit, Chessmaster, Flight Simulator
(I did not modify the game disks to use the additional memory).
As with any expansion memory, you may have to FixHunk some
programs. FixHunk, RamOn\Off, and a few other utilities are
supplied. (If somebody will mail me a memory benchmark test,
I'll run it and report the results - I had never thought I might
be one of the first users of a memory product, so I didn't grab
one when it came by on the net).
While I still have my eyes on a 1 or 2 meg board, I have found
that the extra 1/4 meg actually covers most of my needs. I get
full use of Deluxe Paint II, and it takes a lot of action before
Aegis Animator runs out of memory. In can easily run multiple
compile and edit sessions concurrently. In fact, I will probably
think about getting a hard disk next, instead of more memory.
I have no peripherals other than the 256k chip ram expansion and
two external disks, so I can't comment on compatibility with
other hardware. The instructions note that the C-Ltd aMega 1 meg
ram board needs a simple mod to account for timing differences.
This problem appears to be common to any ROM'ed Amiga, such as
what C-A is now shipping.
If you ever want to return to using a Kickstart disk, you need
only to remove a (non-soldered) jumper from the WCS board and
replace the two original C-A ROM's. (As part of installation, you
verify that this works). Since C-A has now ROM'ed the kernel in
the Amigas currently being shipped, it is unlikely that they will
be changing it. If they do, there is a fair chance that new C-A
ROM's could be just dropped in. If not, you will have to go back
to a "1.3" Kickstart disk or get new ROM's from Creative
Microsystems.
I have no financial or business connection with Creative
Microsystems; I paid list price. I know Rich Rodgers, one of the
principals, from his days with Tektronix. He had a very good
reputation from his work at Tek, and I believe he and one of his
partners did the design for the C-Ltd aMega board and SCSI hard disk.
The address is:
CMI - Creative Microsystems Inc.
10110 SW Nimbus #B1
Tigard, OR 97223
(503) 684-9300 or 620-3821
Jac Colby - they disclaim me around here, too.
UUCP: {ucbvax,decvax,pur-ee,cbosg,ihnss}!tektronix!midas!jacc
-or- jacc@midas.TEK.COM
5529 SW Patton Rd, Portland, OR 97221 (503) 292-1609
-or- MS 94-442, PO Box 4600, Beaverton, OR, 97076 (503) 629-1129
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The above is food for the NSA line eater. Add it to your .signature and
you too can help overflow the NSA's ability to scan all traffic going in or
out of the USA looking for "significant" words. (Sadly, this is not a joke.)grr@cbmvax.UUCP (02/09/87)
In article <983@midas.UUCP> jacc@midas.UUCP (Jac Colby) writes: >This problem appears to be common to any ROM'ed Amiga, such as >what C-A is now shipping. > > Since C-A has now ROM'ed the kernel in >the Amigas currently being shipped, it is unlikely that they will >be changing it. > >Jac Colby - they disclaim me around here, too. Just to avoid confusion, CBM has *NEVER* shipped any Amigas with kickstart in ROM... -- George Robbins - now working for, uucp: {ihnp4|seismo|rutgers}!cbmvax!grr but no way officially representing arpa: cbmvax!grr@seismo.css.GOV Commodore, Engineering Department fone: 215-431-9255 (only by moonlite)