15 Feb
2001
15 Feb
'01
1:05 p.m.
still need at least 80mb of disk though. I've
heard the Amiga or
one of the other commies had a real neat rommed OS that had
graphic primitives.
The most base Amiga 1000's have just 256k of RAM and a single
880k floppy and require two steps to boot the OS (loading Kickstart
off of the 1st floppy and then reading Workbench off of the second)
and will happily run off of that single floppy, even allowing you to
swap it out for whatever application disk you want to use. This with
full GUI, sound and all the other nifty things that go along with
using an Amiga. I no longer recall what the exact size of the
A1000's Kickstart is but nearly all remaining machines (with the
exception of a softkicked A3000) had the Kickstart in ROM. Of
course, there was also the Atari ST line that had it's GEM-based TOS
totally ROM based and ran well in less than 1meg of RAM, though I've
never thought their graphics capabilities were on par with the Amiga.
Jeff
--
Collector of Classic Microcomputers and Video Game Systems:
Home of the TRS-80 Model 2000 FAQ File
http://www.geocities.com/siliconvalley/lakes/6757