I own a fairly early Amiga 500 with Kickstart 1.2 ROMs, Commodore Logo key and the OCS Agnus 8371. Is this system completely compatible with Workbench 1.3? Or does WB 1.3 require Kickstart 1.3 ROMs? What kind of problems, if any, can I expect when running WB 1.3 on it?
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If I remember correctly, you need to upgrade the kickstart to 1.3. Long time since those days, so I can't remember if anything worked at all, or if some parts worked and some not.– UncleBodCommented Oct 7, 2019 at 11:38
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@UncleBod no, sorry, it is completely supported and will work flawlessly, see my answer below. The only difference between a 1.2 and an 1.3 kickstart is that the latter can actually autoboot from HD.– user180940Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 13:16
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No, you can and, more importantly, it is fully supported to run Workbench 1.3 on a Kickstart 1.2 machine.
This was rather common back at that time, because Workbench 1.3 brought some nice new features (like the RAD: drive, better printer drivers), and at least in Europe the first batches of Amiga 500 and Amiga 2000 arrived still with Kickstart 1.2.
On almost the same subject you can see question What exactly are the differences between Kickstart 1.2 and 1.3?
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2In fact, Kickstart 1.2 may be the most compatible version of Kickstart for pre-2.0 software. There are games that work with Kickstart 1.2 but not 1.3, but I'm not aware of any that work with 1.3 but not 1.2. Commented Oct 7, 2019 at 18:18
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@snips-n-snails correct, it was common knowledge at the time, to the point that some people installed 1.2 on 1.3 machines to achieve better compatibility. However, it looks like that the real culprit for the problems with games were rather the custom boot blocks put in by warez groups. Commented Oct 8, 2019 at 9:21
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