Kickstart

Kickstart is the name given to the bootstrap in the Commodore Amiga range of computers. On the original Amiga (the Amiga 1000), this was loaded from disk, although later Kickstarts were on a ROM chip inside the computer. The Amiga 1000 could be modified to take these chips.

As well as containing the code needed to boot the computer, the Kickstart also contained large portions of the Amigas operating system, such as Intuition (the Amigas graphical user interface libraries), Exec (the multitasking kernel), Dos (the disk handling libraries).

Later versions of the kickstart contained drivers for IDE and SCSI controllers, PCMCIA ports and various other hardware that came with Amigas.

The rest of the Amigas operating system was loaded from floppy disks or a hard disk. Each Kickstart version is tied to a particular version of the Amigas operating system software, so you should only boot Workbench 1.3 on a machine with a 1.3 Kickstart ROM. It is possible to boot incorrect versions (Workbench 3.1 will boot on Kickstart 3.0, with some problems). The only exception is Workbench 2.1, which was a software-only update based on Kickstart 2.04. Also, the latest Workbench versions, 3.5 and 3.9, use Kickstart 3.1 and load ROM updates at boot time.

With third party hardware, it is possible to have two or more versions of kickstart in a single machine, selectable either by a switch or a keyboard shortcut when you first turn the machine on.

With third party software, it is possible to have a different kickstart loaded in ram and to use it instead of the ROM one. This programs are called Softkickers[?]