Kickstart (Amiga)

Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a bootable volume, such as a floppy disk.

[1] The first Amiga model, the A1000, required that Kickstart 1.x be loaded from floppy disk into a 256 KB section of RAM called the writable control store (WCS).

Some A1000 software titles (notably Dragon's Lair) provided an alternative code-base in order to use the extra 256 KB for data.

The Amiga CD32 featured a 1 MB ROM (Kickstart 3.1) with additional firmware and an integrated file system for CD-ROM.

The Commodore CDTV featured additional firmware ROMs which are not technically part of the Amiga Kickstart.

[30] Upon start-up or reset the Kickstart performs a number of diagnostic and system checks and then initializes the Amiga chipset and some core OS components.

d) a game or other application directly starting up, taking over all the hardware resources of this computer by avoiding to establish core Exec multitasking, driver initialization etc.

The following colors indicate a problem: However, if an Amiga give a colorcode, it does not always mean that the error comes from a hardware fault, red can also happen if a ROM is mapped to fastmem or by ROM-patches from software.

This allows the user to choose a boot device, set parameters for backwards compatibility and examine Autoconfig hardware.

An MMU-enabled Amiga is able to "shadow" Kickstart from the embedded ROM chip (or from file) into RAM and pass control to it at start-up.