Release date: Spring 1992

Shipped with: (later) Amiga 600 and 600HD models; available as a stand-alone update for all Amiga models.

Media: New ROM (512 KB) and software; but—with the exception of the Amiga 600—not required to run Release 2.05 or Release 2.1

Major enhancements:

• Added: Support for PCMCIA slots (Type II) via the CC0: device (as of Kickstart v37.300).
• Added: Support for internal IDE (as of Kickstart v37.300).
• Added: Support for hard drives larger than 40 MB (as of Kickstart v37.350).
• Added: Support for high-density floppy disk drives.
• Added: "PrepCard" utility for the PCMCIA slot (stored on the Extras disk).
• Changed: Recoverable RAM drive renamed to RAM_0:.
• Removed: "Say" utility and its speech support, consisting of narrator.device and translator.library (as of Workbench v37.72).

Example diskette(s):

There are no visual differences between Workbench 2.04 and 2.05.

Kickstart 37.299

Kickstart 37.300

Kickstart 37.350

Release 2 Compatible

1. Colin Wenzel notes that: "You can boot different variations of drives on earlier versions before 37.350, but 37.350 is the first version that has no size limitation imposed on the drive, (except for the 4 GB filesystem issue). v37.299 won't autoboot any HD. v37.300 will boot drives of limited size; I believe that to be 40 MB or smaller, although I don't remember why. However, there is definitely supposed to be a limit, be it by a software bug or an error that will destroy your data if you go past a known size, I simply don't know now... or, it may be simply that some brands of drives just didn't work. v37.350 will boot anything [below 4 GB], anytime, without any known problems."
2. Giorgio Moscardi reports that he managed to get a 210 MB IDE hard drive working in his Amiga 600 with Kickstart 37.300. He's also heard of many other people doing the same (even with 800 MB hard drives).
3. The difference between v37.71 and v37.72 is the removal of speech support in v37.72. Disk numbers and dates for LIBS:version.library are below:
   

   Workbench 2.05, P/N: 367813-03
   version.library 37.71 (01/09/92)
   
   Workbench 2.05, P/N: 367959-01
   version.library 37.72 (03/23/92)
   

4. While the speech support files were completely removed from 2.1, some 2.05 disks were also shipped without them, as Kenton Groombridge notes: "The OS that was shipped with the A600 was stripped. If you purchased the full 2.05, it was there. 2.05 was the last version of the OS that shipped with narrator.device and translator.library."
5. Thomas Richter notes: There's a problem with this one. The narrator.device was actually not CBM code, but was licensed from Joseph Katz and Mark Barton, for Kickstart 1.3. Today, Joseph runs "Softvoice" as company. Problem is that CBM never licensed the source code for it, and should have never released its update for Kick 2.0 because they did not have a valid license for modification. It was a binary license only. I spoke to Joseph during development of 3.1.4 and he was really surprised that CBM released updates to it as of 2.0. Thus, in short, this will unlikely happen, unless somebody finds sufficient money to re-license the code from SoftVoice. Besides, without all the expertise from Joseph, it is hard to add new features to the narrator.device. The translator.library is simple enough to allow re-implementation, actually there is one on Aminet. Unfortunately, it only supports phonems of the English language. It is actually the same company that released S.A.M. before for the 8-bit product.
6. Like 2.04, the 2.05 Install disk was only shipped with Amigas containing hard drives. Rodney Hester believes that the Install disk was non-existent with v37.72, since it was designed for the A600 (A600HD owners received a full set of v37.71 disks).
7. Although most A600s used 2.05, very early A600s used 2.04, and thus had no internal IDE or PCMCIA support. Richard Lane notes that these unlucky A600 owners had to upgrade to 2.05 (specifically Kickstart v37.300, which added both IDE and PCMCIA support) if they wanted to use either IDE hard drives or PCMCIA cards.
8. Chris Young recalls seeing a later A600 with the early Kickstart 37.299 ROM which could run some games that failed on Kickstart 37.300+ models.
9. 2.05 ROM Part Numbers for the A600:
• v37.299: 391388-01
• v37.300: 391304-01
• v37.350: 391304-02