Editing Amiga (section)

=== Kickstart firmware ===
{{Main|Kickstart (Amiga)}}

Kickstart is the [[firmware]] upon which AmigaOS is [[booting|bootstrap]]ped. Its purpose is to initialize the Amiga hardware and core components of AmigaOS and then attempt to boot from a [[bootable]] [[volume (computing)|volume]], such as a floppy disk or hard disk drive. Most models (excluding the Amiga 1000) come equipped with Kickstart on an embedded [[Read-only memory|ROM-chip]].
There are various editions of Kickstart ROMs starting with Kickstart v1.1 for the Amiga 1000, v1.2 and v1.3 for the A500, Kickstart v2.1 on A500+, Kickstart v2.2 for A600 and dual ROMs for Kickstart v3.0 and 3.1 for A1200 and A4000. After Commodore's demise there have been new Kickstart v3.1 ROMs made available for both the A500 and A600 Computers. Amiga Software is mostly backward compatible, but v2.1 ROMs and newer differ slightly, which can cause software glitches with earlier programs. To help address this and to get earlier programs to work with later Kickstart ROMs, some tools have been produced such as RELOKIK 1.4 and MAKE IT WORK! for the A600 and A1200. They revert the system to temporarily boot in Kickstart v1.3.