Bootstrapping an Amiga without a bootable floppy
Published in 2021, this chronicle by @rvalles details the mechanics of building a profitable, self-funded business without venture backing.
The community focused on B2B customer acquisition channels, cold email vs SEO distribution, and balancing full-time employment with side-project development.
Apparently IBM XT also had a way of being bootstrapped with no drives attached
https://hackaday.com/2011/10/03/resurrecting-an-xt/ ↗
``` ;———————————————————————— ; LOAD A BLOCK OF TEST CODE THROUGH THE KEYBOARD PORT : ; FOR MANUFACTURING TEST. : ; THIS ROUTINE WILL LOAD A TEST (MAX LENGTH=FAFFH) THROUGH : ; THE KEYBOARD PORT. CODE WILL BE LOADED AT LOCATION : ; 0000:0500. AFTER LOADING, CONTROL WILL BE TRANSFERRED : ; TO LOCATION 0000:0500. STACK WILL BE LOCATED JUST BELOW : ; THE TEST CODE. THIS ROUTINE ASSUMES THAT THE FIRST 2 : ; BYTES TRANSFERRED CONTAIN THE COUNT OF BYTES TO BE LOADED : ; (BYTE 1=COUNT LOW, BYTE 2=COUNT HI.) : ;———————————————————————— ```
Another cool thing happening in the Amiga world is PiStorm - a Raspberry Pi based replacement for the CPU. And the resulting speed up in performance and RAM.
This is awesome! I always enjoy reading about projects like this, even though I'm nowhere near a situation where I actually need to bootstrap an Amiga. :D
I guess it's the combination of computer history/nostalgia and the impressive level of knowledge that motivates me the most.
Tiny question: what is LSB?
At this point, we have control again and AmigaOS is almost fully initialized, with the notable exception of dos.library (not required for doing block level I/O), which is skipped as the LSB of its RomTag structure's rt_Flags field is clear.
This is neat. In the 80's, I remember hooking another computer to my Amiga's serial port and entering the debugger ("RomWack".) I had no idea what to do with it though.
Author here. I am amazed it made frontpage.
openbsd's httpd seems to be handling the load well.
I will read your comments if any :)