Function
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. It will then check for connected boot devices and attempt to boot from the one with the highest boot priority. If no boot device is present a screen will be displayed asking the user to insert a boot disk - typically a floppy disk. Insertion of such a bootable disk (other than workbench-like disk) will result in:
a) a command line interface ("CLI") prompt to operate with ROM-internal and disks commands (including programms, scripts) (if the disk is non-workbench, or empty), or
b) a (basic) point and click UI named "Workbench" if the disk contains at least "loadwb" in the "startup-sequence" script residing inside the "s"-folder on this disk.
c) the disk boots into a customized workbench or an application, keeping the OS "alive" in the background.
d) a game, demo or other application directly starts up, taking over all the hardware resources of this computer by avoiding to establish core Exec multitasking, driver initialization etc..
The Kickstart contains many of the core components of the Amiga's operating system, such as:
- Exec - the Amiga's multi-tasking kernel
- Intuition - functionality for GUI, screens, windowing and handling of input/output devices
- Autoconfig - functionality to automatically initialize or boot from compliant expansion hardware
- Floppy disk device driver and file system to read and boot from floppy disk
- DOS library for file access and handling
- AmigaDOS - Command Line Interface (CLI) functionality and a number of core CLI commands
- Graphics library for basic drawing and raster graphics functions using the native Amiga chipset
- Audio device driver for the native Amiga sound hardware
- Device drivers for the Amiga keyboard and mouse/gameports
Kickstart 1.3 is the first version to support booting from a hard disk drive.
From AmigaOS release 2.0 onwards Kickstart also contained device drivers to boot from devices on IDE controllers, support for PC Card ports and various other hardware built into Amiga models.
Read more about this topic: Kickstart (Amiga)
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