Romability [eng]

The romability is the possibility to put a program in the Kickstart rom.

In fact, every programs that everyone of us is using with a Classic isn't romable. A rom is a Read Only Memory.

The big majority of Amiga programs are coded in order to be executed in the ram chip or fast, "peu importe" Gainsbourg :D. Ram accept the reading and the writing of datas.

To make a soft romable, it needs to have a difference in writing. For us, the goal is to modify Warp3D drivers in order to only read their content.

     

Advantages of the romabilty are very important. We have to remember some reasons of the formidable succes of the Amiga 500 at its beginning: it was the simplicity of use. Almost everything was in the Kickstart 1.3 rom and users had a very simple computer to use without installation of additionnal programs. For example the sound driver (audio.device) was inside the kickstart, of course, it was useless to install or load it form a floppy disk or an external hard drive.

When everything is in the Rom, there's just to switch on the machine... and that's all! The computer is ready to work within a fraction of second without any kind of waiting for a loading from an hard disk drive or an USB key...

To cope with an important size of Warp3D drivers, it's possible to compact them in the rom. There's just to add a routine of decompression. At the boot, the content of Warp3D drivers will be unpacked in the fastram in order to make them usable and ready for the OS!

The romability is an important key for unsatisfied users with a Workbench 3.9 difficult to install and to use correctly.

(translated by johnz)