The Polygons of Another World
Traditionally some corrections for the author:<p>>The Amiga 1000 could not boot by themselves, they had no ROM. The bootloader was on a floppy and you better not lose or damage it!<p>Amiga 1000 has bootloader (Kickstart loader) in ROM, chips U5N and U5P - two 256Kbit EPROMs/mask ROMs, 64KB in total. What it didnt have was firmware(Kickstart, like PC bios) or system(Workbench, like PC DOS/Windows) in ROM. You can see chips containing A1000 bootloader on the motherboard picture, its the two with stickers, right below two 8250 CIA chips <a href="https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_photos/a1000mbrev6.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/media/download_...</a><p>You <i></i>cant<i></i> boot(load) without a bootloader. Trivia: Back in the day Bill Gates held a record of writing the shortest bootloader for Altair 8800, computer with nothing but LEDs for output and switches for input. You had to input said bootloader every single time you wanted to load something (like BASIC) from tape. 'Computer Notes Volume 1, Issue 6, 1975' Page Twenty-One, Author Bill Gates: “I’ve written a bootloader that only takes 13 bytes of keyed-in data, but anything smaller than 20 bytes isn’t easy to use.”. He was finally beat by one byte in 2017 <a href="http://just8bits.blogspot.com/2017/03/doing-it-in-less-than-bill-gates.html" rel="nofollow">http://just8bits.blogspot.com/2017/03/doing-it-in-less-than-...</a><p>>It was Commodore best selling product with an estimated 6 millions units shipped from 1987 to 1991<p>other than you know, C64 ;-) and thats not counting other products like Datasette Commodore 1530, shipped with every VIC-20 and C64.<p>>amiga_arch.svg<p>Chip RAM is not directly connected to CPU, its gated behind AGNUS <a href="https://www.pmsoft.nl/amiga/A500-block-diagram.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://www.pmsoft.nl/amiga/A500-block-diagram.jpg</a> DBR signal is what switches CPU data bus access.