ORLANDO of Brainstorm presents to you a test of the new Kickstart V1.4.( Prerelease ). It was of course written by me (Orlando). First time published in the magaZINE by BRAINSTORM.
Enjoy...
Preface
First some important notes from the author : This is the first review of the new Kickstart V1.4. No one before me has written a test of the new Kickstart. (I wrote my article on the 20-09-1989 !!!). Except a magazine, who published the messages from Commodore. But they hadn't the chance to test it themselves. It could be, that I forgot some things but I think the most important things included in this article.
Official news from Commodore
So here are the official messages from Commodore about the new Kickstart and Workbench V1.4 :
1. The famous 'Guru Meditation' is dead. Instead of a nice Guru you get a system-message without a system-crash.
2. The batch language ARexx will be included.
3. Some artists are designing a new Workbench. It should have a professional touch.
4. The screen structures will be enhanced.
5. There will be a new library for standard-requesters.
6. There will also be real multitasking on the Workbench. For example if you choose the menu item 'rename' you can also work somewhere else. So the ZZZ (sleeping) mousepointer you'll never be seen anymore.
7. Some font enhancements.
First impressions
And now here's my review about the new Kickstart V1.4 without Workbench V1.4 (because I haven't a prerelease). My first impression is that someone made a joke, because the Workbench hand diasappeared and instead of it a big Amiga sign on the left side appeared (on my amiga 1000 also on the left side of the console). The colors of the sign are made with the copper. The background is now almost black with a little violet touch ( something like $0303 ). On the right side of the screen is a floppy drive, which looks like an external A2000 drive. And under the drive is a disk which moves into the floppy drive and then moves out again and so on.
The floppy speed test
Now I put a disk into the drive and the Amiga begins to load. But not as boring lame as in the older versions. Now a Fast-File-System is included. Here are the results of some speed tests I have made with a collegue of mine : THE OUTLAW. We used the "Performance" program from a FISH disk:
Kickstart 1.2 Kickstart 1.4
1: 42 entries/sec 61 entries/sec
2: 17 seeks/sec 22 seeks/sec
3: 12245 bytes/s 14093 bytes/s
4: 12977 bytes/s 16282 bytes/s
5: 5221 bytes/s 7665 bytes/s
6: 5388 bytes/s 8295 bytes/s
1: Directory scan
2: Seek/read test
3: Reading speed (Buffer=512)
4: Reading speed (Buffer=8129)
5: Writing speed (Buffer=512)
6: Writing speed (Buffer=8192)
Some other disk improvements
Under Kickstart V1.21 it took a while until the Amiga checked the disk in the other drives. And now you only hear a short scratch and the Amiga continues to boot. If you had a disk under Kickstart V1.2 in a drive and wanted to load from it something and the Amiga didn't check it till this moment, then the 'No disk in drive' message appeared. This bug is now removed.
No more Guru meditations ?
The most thing I would like to know was wether there are really no system-crashes. I caused a system crash and then... The screen changed his colors as usual, when the Amiga makes a reset and then...
(continues on next article...)
This article originally appeared in the Amiga diskmagazine "Zine #1" by Brainstorm 1989.
Some content may refer to activities that are illegal in some countries. BitFellas does not support such activity.
Addresses and other contact information were only valid when this magazine was originally published, in october of 1989.
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