The Amiga Museum

Kickstart 3.0 (version 39.x) was an evolution and refinement of the concepts in Kickstart 2.  It was included as standard in ROMs inside the Amiga 4000 and Amiga 1200 machines, and required for the new Amiga Workbench 3.0 which came with these machines.

The “insert disk” disk remained the same, with the only changes being to the ROM version and copyright years shown:

Amiga 600 Kickstart 2.0 (v 37.300) insert disk screen

Amiga 1200 Kickstart 3.0 (v 39.106) insert disk screen

Kickstart 3.0 was only available for the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 machines.  Older machines were upgradable to Kickstart 3.1, the Amiga 1200 and Amiga 4000 machines were upgradable to Kickstart 3.1, and the last machines to be made by Commodore (CD32, Amiga 4000T), and all machines manufactured by Escom (Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000T), came with Kickstart 3.1

The new pseudo-3D look, introduced with Kickstart 2 was expanded upon, with the window scrollbars now appearing as pseudo-3D objects and the window scroll arrows getting both resized and a different look. For comparison, here are the contents of the Workbench 2.1 (with Kickstart 2) and Workbench 3.0 (With Kickstart 3.0) disks shown:

Workbench 2.1 disk contents, showing the System drawer selected, under Kickstart 2.0

Workbench 3.0 disk contents, showing the System drawer selected, under Kickstart 3.0

The menu bar also had it’s default colour scheme changed, making it better aligned with the pseudo-3D look of the light source being from the top left of the screen, providing more contrast and making unavailable menu options perhaps slightly easier to see at a glance.

Workbench Window Menu with Kickstart 2	Workbench Window Menu with Kickstart 3.0
Workbench Icons Menu with the Information menu item selected under Kickstart 2	Workbench Icons Menu with the Information menu item selected under Kickstart 3

Amiga 1200/4000 Kickstart 3.0 revision 39.106 module list Checksum: 8B56E930