Amiga ROMs

Introduction to Amiga Kickstart ROM

Amiga Kickstart ROMs are required in order to boot any Amiga computer. In addition to essential boot functions, Amiga Kickstart contains large parts of the Amiga Operating system (AmigaOS). All Amiga computers (except A1000) are shipped with a built-in ROM chip.

Since Amiga ROM-files are copyrighted, one is not allowed to use any version of the Amiga Kickstart ROM unless one;

1. Owns an Amiga computer equipted with the corresponding ROM version.
2. Purchases the ROM, either as hardware chip or as a software file.

Buy Kickstart ROM-files here
Instant digital download - Official and 100% legal

Getting ROMs for Amiga emulation

A common reason for obtaining the Amiga ROMs is emulation. The most popular Amiga emulator is WinUAE, which due to copyright reasons doesn't include (but requires) the Amiga Kickstart ROM files.

• A fast and easy way to get Amiga ROMs is buying the Amiga Forever emulation and support package. It contains all Amiga Kickstart ROMs from version 1.x to 3.x, including CDTV and CD32 extended ROMs. Amiga Forever makes emulation extremely easy by providing a one-click gaming interface, ready-to-run Amiga hard disks and more than 100 pre-installed Amiga games. Upon purchase Amiga Forever and the ROM-files becomes immediately available for download.
• Despite common online claims, it is not permissible to extract a ROM image from your own Amiga computer for use in emulators or on other systems. The Amiga ROM/OS is licensed exclusively for the original machine it came with.

Models and Kickstart versions

The table below illustrates the Amiga computer models and the corresponding Kickstart ROM versions.

	v1.1	v1.2	v1.3	v2.04	v2.05	v3.0	v3.1
Amiga 1000	¹
Amiga 500
Amiga 2000
Amiga 3000
Amiga CDTV			²
Amiga 500+
Amiga 600
Amiga 600HD
Amiga 1200
Amiga 4000
Amiga 4000T
Amiga CD32							³

¹ Kickstart 1.1 was not stored in ROM, but loaded from floppy disk.
² Enhanced Kickstart with CD Boot, a CD player and card slot for saving game data.
³ Enhanced Kickstart with CD-filesystem, NV-RAM and the AKIKO chip.

Screenshots

Below are screenshots from the most common Kickstart versions. Click the thumbnails for full size images.

ROM 1.1	ROM 1.2	ROM 1.3	ROM 2.04
ROM 2.05	ROM 3.0	ROM 3.1

Remember this disk?

Yep, it's the classic Amiga 500 boot screen. Thanks to the Amiga emulator WinUAE you can relive the good old days on your PC computer.

ROM trivia

Amiga games are sometimes incorrectly defined as ROMs, but they are actually read/writable disk images (except CD32 games of course). The term ROM is only correct for console/arcade games which have been dumped from cartridges or CDs.

Download Kickstart ROMs

The only legal way to obtain Amiga ROMs is to buy and download the Amiga Forever package.

Kickstart version history

• v1.1, released 1985
  Seperate Kickstarts for PAL (50Hz) and NTSC (60 Hz) Amiga computers.
• v1.2, released 1986
  Kickstart now automatically detects NTSC and PAL mode. The text "v1.2" was added to next to the disk on kickstart screen.
• v1.3, released 1988
  It was now possible to boot from hard disk. Recoverable ramdrive.device (RAD:) was introduced.
• v2.04, released 1991
  Enhanced GUI with a fresh 3D-look. Bootmenu for disabling/enabling devices. Improved filesystem.
• v2.05, released 1992
  Support for >40 MB hard drives and HD-floppy disks. Also support for PCMCIA-slots and internal IDE-interface.
• v3.0, released 1992
  Support for AGA-chipset and greatly improved boot menu for disabling/enabling CPU caches.
• v3.1, released 1994
  Many bugfixes. Improved RTG-handling and support for the CD32 Akiko chip.