Kickstart was the basic instructions of the computer. In today's terms this is the equivalent to your computer's bios chip. On the original release of Amiga 1000 this was not on a chip but in a floppy disc. You had to load the Kickstart first and then load the operating system, program or game you wanted. Starting with the Amiga 500 this Kickstart was an actual chip on the motherboard on the computer. There were tons of different Kickstart versions and depending on your computer model you could just pop out the chip and replace it with the newer Kickstart chip to gain some of the new functionality. Starting with Kickstart 3.0 your machine had to be AGA compatible in order to work.

Last updated on October 25, 2009 by ConnX