26 Feb
1999
26 Feb
'99
4:56 a.m.
Re:
After this, the Amiga would prevent write accesses to
this RAM, making it behave like a 256K ROM.
Commodore called the WOM, or Write-Once Memory. Now the first Amigas could be
delivered with the incomplete Kickstart 1.0. After the new Kickstart versions
were complete (1.1 and 1.2), the Amiga owner simply had to insert new
Kickstart disks.
I remember buying & installing a kit from somewhere, which was a
ROM and a switch, which enabled me to either boot my 1000 as
normal (i.e., insert the Kickstart disk) *or* boot with the ROM, and
use that extra memory as system memory. The drawback to using it
as system memory was, IIRC, that the graphics chips couldn't
access it, so some special actions were sometimes called for
(which, of course, I can't recall now).
To install it, we opened the Amiga 1000, and pulled out some chip
(ROM?) and replaced it with some kind of piggyback carrier (dim
memories). What I remember clearly is that when we finished
putting it back together (boy, was *that* a machine not intended for
users to pull apart), we ended up with extra screws. So, we opened
it up again and found places to put them...so successfully that when
we got towards the end, we'd run out of screws too early. Sigh.