Hello all, while waiting for arrival of kipper's A500 8MB board I tried few ideas to get A500 to boot from IDE (CF in this case). First I tried modding kickstart 1.3 with scsi.device with kick13scsipatch.lha pack from aminet. It worked, but in reality Workbench 1.3 is not exactly useful and that's only WB to boot with kickstart 1.3. One solution would be to simply buy kickstart 3.1 ROM and swao them, but I wanted to have kick1.3 compatibility. Next solution would be to get 3.1 ROM and kickstart switcher, third one to somehow softkick A500 to kick3.1.
So, after few days I managed to get this working and I present to you Kickstart 3.1 boot floppy!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75853299/SoftMKickBoot_v1.2.zip
It uses mkick1.9 (available on aminet and archive included on floppy for copyright reasons) to softkick 1.x A500 to kickstart 3.1.
For this to work you need A500/A600/A2000 kickstart 3.1 file (version 40.063) which is not included on floppy as it's copyrighted. It needs to be named kick40063.A600 and put in floppy root. MD5 hash of correct kickstart file is e40a5dfb3d017ba8779faba30cbd1c8e.
After preparing, transfer it from ADF to floppy or use floppy emulator (tested on Gotek and HxC). It will "eat" 512kB from your memory so don't be surprised if you boot it on A500 with 512 kB chip and 512 kB slow and notice you only have 512 kB chipram. That's normal . After you power cycle, or hard reset, it'll be back to kick1.3 and full RAM.
I've tested it in WinUAE (A500, kick1.3, 512kB chip, 512kB slow, and some other combinations, some work, some don't) and on real A500 with 512/512 and it works. Another user from here (sweetlilmre, thanks for testing) has tested it on A500 and kipper's board and it also worked for him (he also did HxC test). So it should work in theory for others too .
This is mainly for use with Kipper's 8MB board, to get access to HDD and WHDLoad games stored there. You can try it with 512/512 A500, but it won't be that much use as it will cut your available memory to half. But I if you want to see purple kickstart screen, or a bit of WorkBench 3.1 it's OK.
So, after few days I managed to get this working and I present to you Kickstart 3.1 boot floppy!
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/75853299/SoftMKickBoot_v1.2.zip
It uses mkick1.9 (available on aminet and archive included on floppy for copyright reasons) to softkick 1.x A500 to kickstart 3.1.
For this to work you need A500/A600/A2000 kickstart 3.1 file (version 40.063) which is not included on floppy as it's copyrighted. It needs to be named kick40063.A600 and put in floppy root. MD5 hash of correct kickstart file is e40a5dfb3d017ba8779faba30cbd1c8e.
After preparing, transfer it from ADF to floppy or use floppy emulator (tested on Gotek and HxC). It will "eat" 512kB from your memory so don't be surprised if you boot it on A500 with 512 kB chip and 512 kB slow and notice you only have 512 kB chipram. That's normal . After you power cycle, or hard reset, it'll be back to kick1.3 and full RAM.
I've tested it in WinUAE (A500, kick1.3, 512kB chip, 512kB slow, and some other combinations, some work, some don't) and on real A500 with 512/512 and it works. Another user from here (sweetlilmre, thanks for testing) has tested it on A500 and kipper's board and it also worked for him (he also did HxC test). So it should work in theory for others too .
This is mainly for use with Kipper's 8MB board, to get access to HDD and WHDLoad games stored there. You can try it with 512/512 A500, but it won't be that much use as it will cut your available memory to half. But I if you want to see purple kickstart screen, or a bit of WorkBench 3.1 it's OK.