Sigurbjörn Lárusson's blog

Musings of a network engineer

Pagetable Amiga

Read a very interesting article over on Pagetable about pre-1.0 beta versions of the Amiga Kickstart disks. Apparently the disk that the original Amiga Kickstart came on was a re-used Amiga pre-release developer disk. Since the Kickstart only takes 256k (and the floppy is over 800) there is a bunch of files that can be retrieved from the disk and examined further.

As an old Amiga user and a nerd I found this very intriguing so I dug up the old Kickstart ADF files and fired up WinUAE to do some testing of my own. I also discovered that this does not apply only to the Kickstart 1.0 disk but also to (at least) the 1.1 disk which contains a slightly newer developer disk. It's quite fun to compare the different versions on each disk, including some of the original AmigaDOS commands and see how they changed between their pre-release revisions and the final release (1.0) revision. I've put some work into comparing each fun to try to find the differences between the different revisions.

I've had a ton of fun doing this, and I've altered the extract-adf tool which Michael Steil graciously supplied on that page I linked before and even created some new ones to look into the hunks in the executable binary files and send files over the serial. I'll make these available to the public when I've cleaned them up a little, perhaps next month