Re: ROM 3 superiority (was: ROM 01 Superiority)

[a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca (Mitchell Spector)]

"william strutts" <wrstrutts1@home.com> wrote:

>"Adalbert Goertz" <goertz@cyberspace.org> wrote in message
>> re:
>>> - System 5 tools in ROM firmware
>>
>> Which System 601 in ROM firmware?

    None at all. The ROM 3 was released in August of 1989 with the
completed firmware (341-0748/0737) presumably at the same time or
very shortly afterwards. That's long before System 6 had even been
conceived.

    All the toolsets, in _every_ ROM 3 machine, are System 5 based.
I believe they're from System 5.0 (not 5.0.1 or 5.0.2). If you load up
System 5.0.2 or higher, newer toolsets are loaded from disk that will
override the ones in ROM--that is if they changed from 5.0. Even in
System 6.0.1, quite a few toolsets are still loaded from ROM which 
is one of the reasons the GUI is quicker compared with a ROM 01
machine (2.8 MHz read access from ROM reads, versus 2.6 MHz 
read access from RAM; freshing slows RAM down a bit).

    Loading System 5.0.2 and higher also patches bugs found in the
ROM firmware (they're in the 'TS3' file, which corrected more bugs
with each new GS/OS release).

>The never released ROM 4.

    Actually, the "Mark Twain" (those recovered anyway) used the
ROM 3 firmware. If it had ever been completed and released, it
obviously would have had an updated ROM with (depending on
the time frame) System 5.0.4 or 6.0 toolsets in ROM. 

    I'm curious what's in that "341-0749" chip you came across.
You should dump a copy of to disk to compare against the
standard 341-0748. 

Mitchell Spector
a_specto@alcor.concordia.ca