

Nearly identical in hardware with the same ECS chipset, and a slightly updated kickstart 2.05 which added support for IDE harddrives and PCMCIA cards. This replaced the original A500 and was as popular. This looked the same as the A500 but had the same enhanced ECS chipset as the A3000, but with the kickstart 2.04 roms now loaded from rom chips. But some older titles didn't work due to changes in the custom chip set and the kickstart roms.Īfter the A3000 came the A500 Plus. In general most games that ran on an A500 with kickstart 1.3 would also work on a system with kickstart 2.04 roms. The A3000 was the first Amiga is use an updated version of the Amiga's custom chipset, called the Enhanced Chip Set (or ECS for short) and this came with kickstart 2.04, which was a huge upgrade over the older 1.X versions, and with it Workbench 2, which also improved the Amiga OS greatly. This was by far the best design as it meant different kickstart versions could be swapped very easily with a software update. This was similar to the A1000 in that it also didn't have actual kickstart roms, but this time the Kickstart was loaded from the internal Harddrive. Kickstart 1.3 is the most compatible version of the rom out of all versions as most games were written for this version of the A500.Īfter the A500 came the A3000. This also first came with the kickstart 1.2 version and later the 1.3 version. The same was true of the A2000's little brother, the A500. The A2000 first came with Kickstart 1.2, and was later updated with Kickstart 1.3. This meant that you didn't first need to boot up a kickstart disk, but could instead stick a software disk into the drive and switch on the system to boot directly into the software, making life much easier. But having to load it from floppy disk every time was tiresome after a while.Īfter the A1000 came the A2000, and this was the first to have the kickstart files loaded onto rom chips. This did have the advantage of allowing newer kickstart versions to be easily used on the system by obtaining the latest version. You needed to do this every time you rebooted the system and then swap the disk for one with the actual software you wished to run, such as the Workbench OS disk or a game.

The very first Amiga released in 1985, the Amiga A1000, came with Kickstart version 1.0, but this Amiga didn't have this on rom chips, instead booted the code into memory from a Kickstart floppy disk.

These were tied in with each version of Workbench, with each version of Workbench requiring the same version of kickstart roms in the system for it to work. Without the Kickstart roms an Amiga is useless.Īs Amiga development progressed newer versions of the kickstart roms were released. The Kickstart Roms are rom chips mounted on the Amiga motherboard and contain the core system code/files required for the system to load and run any Amiga software.
