Back in my Amiga days, I was one of the (un)fortunate souls who ended up with an Amiga 500 Plus, which came with Kickstart 2.0 and ECS chipset.
Great that it was new version, but unfortunately not quite backwards compatible with some older games, such as Pirates! which was one of my all time fav games.
Thankfully after a few months, CU Amiga put a copy of Relokick on a coverdisk, which meant I no longer needed to shell out $100+ for a “kick switch” and 1.3 ROM chip, as it “emulated” a 1.3 ROM (in RAM), and allowed me to play some old games, including Pirates!
As time went by, my Amiga setup changed and towards the end, was quite a powerful setup (030EC @ 40Mhz, 6MB RAM, 120MB SCSI HDD) – but being an A500, no way to have AGA graphics and to have the latest Kickstart 3.1 was going to cost $100 (again).
Aminet was a thing by then, and with internet access, I came across Skick – another ROM “emulator”. Difference was this time, it could handle any ROM you threw at it, so you could load 1.3, or 3.1 – yahoo!!!
Catch was, you needed to obtain a 3.1 ROM file – thanks to a certain IRC channel, I soon obtained this.
I played around with Skick and found it worked as advertised – the decision was made to upgrade my Workbench to 3.1 fulltime using Skick.
But how – I used an HDD for everything, and didn’t want to have to fire up my original install (2.04), run SKick, and then boot into 3.1.
Soon worked out I could add a few lines to my startup-sequence which would check the existing environment via the graphics.library file (built into the ROM), and if it showed 2.0 or less, startup-sequence would execute Skick with the 3.1 ROM.
It worked perfectly.
Everything worked, nothing complained about the “emulated” environment, and it gave me access to more software and functionality.
My system stayed this way until the GVP A530 unit died in 1998 – RIP.
And I went to the dark side.