|
Kickstart on the Amiga was the central part of the Amiga's Operating System, which was essential to running the Amiga.
It normally resided on replaceable ROM chips, but on the A1000 it was loaded from floppy disk and some versions of the A3000
it was loaded from the hard disk. These special custom chips contained the kernal of the AmigaDOS operating system, and had
to be upgraded to suit the version of AmigaDOS being used. The advantage of having the kernal in ROM meant that the boot
process could be speeded up and in later versions it enabled customised options to be invoked before the boot process itself
occurred. This meant that screen resolutions etc could be changed using the lowest resolution, before the higher resolution
or multi-sync screen options were invoked, so that if the screen had been downgraded for any reason, it was possible to
switch back very easily - simply holding down both mouse buttons during the boot process would cause the options screen to
magically appear.
|