Commodore Amiga 600 Part 1: Was This Machine Just A Big Mistake, Or Is It An Unappreciated Classic?
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- čas přidán 4. 06. 2024
- Hi everyone and welcome to this first part in our Amiga 600 series. Where to start with this machine? Commodore's biggest mistake in the 16 bit era? An unappreciated classic? Is it a secret little gem? Let's find out! #AMayGA
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Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:11 What are we working with?
03:02 History
04:59 Teardown
08:40 Components
10:08 Future plans
References
www.old-computers.com/museum/...
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_600
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodo...
www.computinghistory.org.uk/de...
amr.abime.net/issue_192_pages
Attributions
By "Joe Smith" (Uploader of original was Joeinwap at en.wikipedia (Changes made by Ubcule)) - Modified version of original:- Amiga3000front.jpg, Public Domain, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
By B Buxton - Photo by B Buxton., CC BY-SA 3.0, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index...
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/ @theretroshack - Věda a technologie
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I loved my A600. Used it for years a great little machine!
That's what I'm discovering too :)
Most people didn't like A600 when it were new, but when it became rare people suddenly wanted it as a portable Amiga.
It were more handy to drag around than any other Amiga.
I loved mine back in the day, the upgrade from the c64 to a600 was way better than a600 to pc.
The A600 gets a hard time of it, and i have no idea why. The small form factor is great, and the PCMCIA slot and IDE interface are a god send. The A600 is great, i have a Vampire on mine, and it's plenty quick. loved the vid. :)
Thanks very much - appreciated :) :)
It was launched 5 years after that Amiga 500 and yet used the same old processor, also the same processor from the A1000 which was launched 7 years before. They should've either launched with a much lower price, or put a 68020 in the machine. Form factor is indeed nice though, it could've been a success.
The PCMCIA slot might be useful now for Amiga users, but in the 90s very little use was gotten out of it, and I suspect that it played a part in the general dissatisfaction with the machine and also its cost (originally dubbed the A300, it was intended to be a cheaper version of the A500). There were a few RAM cards but it was slower access than a direct interface such as the A500 side slot. A few years after Commodore went bust you could get a nice little 2x CD drive via PCMCIA, but that's about it. The IDE was a decent idea, though then again did it play a part in the high cost of the machine? I'm sure it would have been great for any A600 users who chose to get one, though I imagine most folk who could afford one in the couple of years before Commodore went down would have plumped for an A1200 without a hard disk for less money than an A600HD. It's essentially an A500+ without any ability to use side slot or trapdoor A500 expansions, no NUMPAD and it was more expensive - £400 in 1992! The A500+ had itself only been out a year, then they release the A600 with a price which suggests it was a modest upgrade and stop production of the most popular Amiga ever, the A500. It rang alarm bells with me when I saw the specs; it made no sense and indicated to me that Commodore were far from the expert computer company that I had believed they were.
@@danyoutube7491Agree an easy cost cut there. I guess they wanted to put and expansion slot of some description anyway but then can internally upgrade with combination of bottom expansion and HD interface
You need the old Kickstart for Amiga 500 to play many games. It is possible to load from a floppy. Then the computer is as good a games machine as Amiga 500. Many people were disappointed with their newer machines not being compatible with old stuff. It is something Commodore did not understand.
Yep - part three will cover the installation of a rom-switcher :)
Being an amateur radio operator the comment about removing the RF shield brings a tear to my eye. The RF noise level in urban environments makes using HF/shortwave radio impossible. The rise of switch-mode power supplies and PWM LED light drivers with substandard RF noise suppression, ADSL/VDSL internet service, Ethernet neworks, inverter compressor controllers in air conditioning units, solar power inverters all add to the noise floor. VDSL is especially insidious as it directly radiates RF noise through the HF RF spectrum.
You may say "amateur radio... who cares about that!?". You may be right, but what happens when the RF noise around you gets so bad that you can't use Wifi or your mobile/cellular phone? :-)
All good points - and following this, and some other advise, I'll be putting the bottom shield back in :)
That is a valid question at the end. There are also people who have a sort of or kind of alergy towards RF noise. They can never live around mobile phones and wifi routers. I guess it was not a problem in the old days, because things were shielded better.
@@brostenen - There's no evidence that such an "allergy" exists. Those people's problems tend to be psychiatric in nature.
@@paulharker7184 That is why I wrote "sort og" and "kind of". Because I did not remember the exact english word. Reason bring that English is not my native language.
There's still a few of us using Amigas for packet radio on HF (especially 20m). Come and join us: 14.105 LSB 300 baud :)
I got the impression that Commodore Business Machines essentially mismanaged itself out of existence.
You’re not alone in thinking that :)
One of the retro computing youtube channels (can't remember which one) had an interview with the former Commodore UK boss and that seemed to be his opinion as well.
It went downhill as soon as Jack Tramiel left.
@@V3ntilator By all accounts he was an arsehole and a crook whose treatment of various third parties did Commodore's reputation, and therefore the Amiga, no favours in the long run.
I'm a simple man, I see an Amiga getting some TLC, I press like.
:) Thanks - I'll make sure she comes out looking absolutely fabulous! :)
Yep, so did I. Simple men loves Amiga!!
I had an amiga 600 back in the day and i loved it and lots of amazing games really miss it
The A600 is my favourite. Great form factor, IDE, PCMCIA and 2mb Chipmem (with upgrade). Once the Buffee and Pistorm start working in this little gem, it will be an amazing little Amiga. Imagine the potential.
Couldn't agree more!
There's a very cheap 10ukp wifi network stack dongle for the ZX Spectrum, use some 80MHz wonder SoC ARM, it could be programmed to be an accelerator for the Spectrum or any other 8bit....
Damn shame that Commodore USA and Commodore Canada had no idea what an incredible machine that Amiga was, and didn't know how to market it. They're incredibly rare to find, and quite expensive to buy second in in North America.
Now that surprises me! I don't know why (probably with CBM being an American company) but I always thought the Amiga was popular across the pond - perhaps not :)
@@TheRetroShack We were thoroughly entrenched in the IBM and IBM Compatible market for business, the Apple II and Macintosh lines for education machines, and the C64 dominating the low-end. CBM tried marketing the Amiga as a business machine, but it never caught on. Atari made the same mistake with the ST over here, too.
The only success that Commodore had with the Amiga in North America was in broadcasting and entertainment-- namely, with Video Toaster and Lightwave 3D. We never got any of the games that you guys in the UK did!
I had the sheer joy to live the 80s and the rise of the home computer, something sadly, no lifetime will ever experience! I remember getting my Amiga, the a500 with 1.3 kickstart. At the time it was pricey so not many people I knew had it! I always remember a couple of mates getter 600’s and 1200’s quite a while after me getting my a500, having built up quite a substantial software library, I was amazed at how much software that worked on my a500 failed to run on the 600/1200’s
For me, the a500 with 1.3 kickstart just went to prove, if it’s not broke, don’t fix it!
I have a similar love and respect for my A500 - it's not a plus, never had a 600 or 1200 and never really felt I missed out :). I'm wondering if this 600 (when fully modded up) will change my mind? :) Thanks for watching :)
@@TheRetroShack I think the problem today is a lot of folk are contaminated with technology of today so they can’t see technology for what it was way back when! When I got my Amiga a500 it blew my mind because their simply wasn’t anything else for the home market that could compete with it! Sadly today, I tend to ignore most folk who talk yesterday’s tech because it’s always tainted with megahertz, frames per second, blah blah blah! For me, it was and always will be a joy to remember how much fun me and my mates had just playing and enjoying a game for what it was!!
Enjoying your channel having recently stumbled upon you! Keep up the good work, it’s appreciated!
@@SamM-oh2cx Thanks! And couldn’’t agree more!
We had one at Sensible for testing and though it wasn't bad, (it is an Amiga after all), it did feel like a step back given the A500+ was such a beast of a machine. I personally can't see why they bothered releasing it or maybe they should have just released the hardware as an update to the A500+ with the new PCMCIA and IDE stuff. A500 Pro or retain the A600 name within the existing A500 case?
Oooooh the possibilities! I love to speculate like this :) :)
Hi Stoo - would you mind getting in touch with me at shackofretro@gmail.com - thanks :)
Personally I would have ditched PCMCIA. I have no idea how much it cost and I know it has turned out to be useful for retro users these days, but in the time it was actually being sold the PCMCIA slot was barely utilised for either the A600 or A1200. The internal IDE was a good idea though. Perhaps the A500+ with an A600 sized mobo and IDE would have been a better product.
This kind of content is very relaxing and enjoyable for me. It totally brings back my childhood. I love it! I just want more. Good work!
Thanks very much and glad you’re enjoying the channel :)
I got the A600 with a 20MB internal harddrive for my 14th birthday and I had it for many many years. I added and extra 2MB fast RAM to it. I remember benchmarking the harddrive to a total of 50kb/s. Blazingly fast :D but it got the job done. I could play Dune 2, Eye of the beholder, Zak Makraken and the alien mindbenders and Moneky Island all day long. There were some games that din't like the 2.0 kickstart ROM but I learned to manage.
I remember when it first came out, even back then we thought Commodore had completely lost the plot
And unfortunately, they had :(
A600 was from Commodore Germany if I recall, A500+ was USA.
Without a doubt the best amigas for DJing. Just needs extra chip ram, a flash card and C321 and C331 removing from the main board to make the audio shine.
And if anyone is an authority on this - it's you Sir! Glad to see you on the channel. :)
Can you clarify that audio thing? Removing some component makes audio cleaner?
@@betterbeavailable they are labelled C321 and C331. They are on the underside of the 600 motherboard.
Just desolder them.
@@HoffmanCZcams and then what happens?
Loving this channel, fantastic work on the restoration. A funny story whe I was 5 years old back in 1985, my brother used to remove the glass fuse from the power pack of the original breadboard power supply unit to stop me playing it (a bit extreme) but we took the original down to the local computer shop once when he was out with his mates and got a copy of it. He only figured it out whe he came home one day and the power pack was warm... Great memories. My brother sucks :)) haha
Thanks for sharing! And glad you're enjoying the channel :)
Back when it was released it was seen as a step back, but its turns out over time that its expandability potential was really good, doesnt cost much to turn it into a highly usable machine today. It should have been much cheaper than A500
I'm certainly looking forward to getting this all pimped up :) :)
With the A500 and A500+, the CPU is in DIP packaging in the socket and can easily be replaced with a CPU upgrade.
With the A600, on the other hand, the SMD CPU is firmly soldered. This makes a CPU upgrade difficult. In addition, there is very little space in the A600. There were CPU upgrades that were plugged backwards onto the CPU.
Then the 68000 CPU cannot address much memory. The PCMCAI slot must be subtracted from the memory area and only has a 16-bit data bus, not 32-bit.
The IDE port for hard drives is an advantage, but ATAPI software is missing for CD-ROMs.
The ROM in A600 is the same as in A500/A500+/A2000. But you need at least version 2.1 , better V 3.x
The A600 is my favourite Amiga as it was the machine that my grandfather owned.
That's lovely - and a nice memory :)
I had an A500 when C= released the A600.
Useless to say I was desapointed by C= lack of understanding of the market and, as everyone else I hated the A600. Not because of what it was but rather because of what it was not.
Needless to say that I now own two A600, one of wich is vampirised.
I appreciate everything about it. The form factor, the IDE, the PCMCIA, the cuteness.
I will grudgingly admit that it IS cute :) :)
Why do RF units always go rusty? It doesn't seem to matter which system you're dealing with, the RF unit goes rusty.
You know what? You're right! Never really thought about it before but you're absolutely right! Why is that??
Can confirm, is the metal plated a certain way for RF suppression?
@@falken_gt4 Isn't it covered in Nickel or Tin? EDIT: Maybe Zinc plated?
They're cad plated but it's very thin. Being in contact with other metals the cadmium goes away and allows the steel under to rust.
Not all RF Modulators go rusty; I have seen several examples of the Aztec UM1233 that was commonly used in 8-bit computers that looked as bright and shiny as the day they were made.
Congrats! Looks like a very tidy example.
From a long-term A600 owner, a few tips:
- seriously consider paying someone else to do the recapping, as it's a bastard of a job
- keep the bottom RF shield
- consider replacing the keyboard membrane with a hard (PCB) membrane
- don't bother replacing the RTC battery once removed from the memory expansion (the RTC isn't really necessary in an A600)
Can't wait to see how this A600 scrubs up!
Thanks fort the advise - all good points, but I will do my own recap because I'm clearly a sadist! :) :)
I had one of these, but soon upgraded to a PC, so never really gave it much time. I always liked the look of it though
Oh Wayne... Like me you fell from the Amiga to the depths of PC ownership... What are we like? :) :)
Love recapping me a 600 or 1200. Can't wait for part two.
Me either :)
I recently got an A500 but I forgot how huge it is. I just didn't have the space in my little retro corner so I got an A600 and it's perfect for my needs.
The A500 is a big beastie for sure :) :)
I never owned the A600, but a friend lent his to me when he upgraded to a PC. I had lots of fun with it including many sleepless nights playing CIV 1 and Frontier: Elite 2. Looking forward to the next videos to see what you do for upgrades.
Civilisation - going to have to dig that out and give it a go!
Oh gosh, even on my A1200 with fast ram, the frame rate in Frontier (and Dune II) is barely acceptable. I can only imagine what it's like to play on an A500.
The 600 is one of the intermediate models Commodore fooled with when they could have spared their effort for developing newer tech. Anyhow, I own one, and two 500+'s, one of which has had the battery spew its juices on the mobo. It still works, I have to make the time to soak and scrub with vinegar, rinse with distilled water, and then rinse with IPA or dry in the oven. If it fails, no big loss.
The 600 while being a neat compact IDE ready Amiga, is a PITA in that Commodore used the cheapest SMD caps to build it, and now 30 years later there is no unit I think where the original caps haven't borked. The 500 family with through-hole technology hasn't got this problem, and it even appears that they would work with a majority of the caps removed.
I am come VARTA destroyer of mainboards!
The A600 is the my go to gaming machine even though I've go a pile of 1200s and a 3000. Easy to pull out and takes zero space. With a Furia it flies.
The bottom RF shield needs to remain or you'll face a world of pain when it comes to mechanical unstability. Touching it without gloves will cause corrosion within a few weeks. Clean it with IPA asap and buy latex gloves.
ps. Cap twisters and cutters will suffer in the after life. Karma. ds.
Good tip on the RF Shield - thanks!
Agreed, adding a Furia and addition chip ram is a no brainer. The A600 with Furia is a Compact and super fast Amiga for limited space desks. If you can live without the numerical pad for external View on games such as ArmourGeddon and F18 Interceptor, then you're golden. Just get another A500 to whip out, if need the numerical pad lol.
@@yeogav Agree. It’s a fantastic machine as long as flight sims isn’t your thing.
You have _a pile_ of 1200's...?!
I'm not jealouse, I'm just happy for you
[cries in broken 600]
QJ megastar joystick. very nice.. i recently got a QJ TopStar.. been wanting one since 1989.. was very chuffed to get one...
Fab joysticks - just SO big!!!!
@@TheRetroShack oh totally.. just wanted one to scratch that nostalgia itch really.. goes with my 2 comp pros and zip stick.. just want to get a clear comp pro now..
The A600 feels like a TOY, and the decision to remove the numeric keypad was pure insanity! The A1200 is what the A600 should've been.
I had one myself as a kid, but dumbass me carved the joystick ports up trying to get the Robocop 3 dongle to fit >.>
Oops! Amazing when you look back at all the stuff you ruined as a kid and now look back with regret! I had a 007 Aston Martin Dinky(?) car and distinctly remember smashing the thing to pieces on the skirting board... :)
@@TheRetroShack Oh yeah, wish someone would make some replica shells, so I can put right my mistake. 500 and 1200 easy to get, but no 600.
But oh yeah, I smashed a few matchbox car windscreens to simulate them in a crash or had bulletholes :(
@@Larry A600 is picking up in popularity. I reckon replica cases will start appearing at some point.
@@WDeranged fingers crossed!
I...... put an original first press Beatles record on an antique gramophone and it absolutely.... just please don't tell my dad, he still doesn't know after 30 years.
I ordered one last week and it's on its way to the US from the UK, excited to get it. BTW, May is Amiga months via #AMayGA...didn't know you did Amiga stuff otherwise I would have invited you (not too late to add the hashtag).
Darn! Wish I'd known that - I'll pop the hashtag in the description and tags anyway, even if I'm late to the party :) Thanks for watching and good luck with your Amiga :)
@@TheRetroShack Really sorry I missed contacting you as I love your channel. I scoured channels I knew and contacted them but didn't want to bother everyone since many are busy and not everyone does Amiga and not everyone likes doing themes. We still have a few days and a few of us have more videos coming out this weekend so not too late. It's been small but nice and we even had a 100K channel joined in on one. I think it'll be about the size of the first SepTandy which was about 30 videos. If there's interest we'll be more organized next year and have more folks join in (SepTandy grew in its second year to about 120 and they are already in planning for this fall).
@@8BitRetroJournal I'll be all over it next year! :)
Was a Atari ST/STe user back then so this is uncharted territory, very intresting.
You're going to LOVE the next Atari video then :) :)
I've never used an Amiga, but I'm curious about it. When I looked at the different models, the one that stood out to me as interesting was the Amiga 600. It seems to me that it's not a bad computer at all, but perhaps it was just not ideally placed into the market at the time that it would have been best received.
The A600 was simultaneously ahead of its time with features such as PCMCIA and onboard IDE support, yet slightly obsolete as it was the last of the 68000s. Capacitors notwithstanding, the A600 has aged exceptionally well IMHO.
It was just a strange offering at the time and diluted Commodores research, manufacturing and marketing budget which could/should have been focused on truly next-gen stuff. But at least now I have things to talk about :) :)
@@OzRetrocomp The A600 had the first 68000. The original 68000 released in 1979, in a machine released late 1992. The A600 was obsolete junk when it was new.
@@jimb12312 If you like new obselete, try the 1986 Oric Atmos, lovely keyboard and csse, shame about the circa 1976 innards.
I still have my A600 HD from back in the 90's. It was sold without the hard drive (not sure if this was a cost saving measure here in Australia. It has a 64MB CD card and 1MB Trapdoor upgrade. I just bought the PiStorm and A600 adaptor yesterday so will be revising when it arrives (Shipping from Europe may take a while)
Yes - international shipping is taking AGES at the moment :(. Good luck with the PiStorm :)
When I dig through old magazines, then I discover that Commodore wanted to release games on PCMCIA storage that booted directly. At least that was what they said during the promo tour when talking to journalists.
I suspect, that they wanted to create a new kind of C64GS, but avoid yet another disaster like CDTV. Hence a keyboard and no CD drive.
Also I suspect that they wanted to target the machine, at the vast software library that was already in place.
Combining all this, then I think this is something people have not understood at all. A low spec gaming machine for the kids, that was just barely able to do basic word processing for the school. And then at the fathers office, there would be a more serious work machine wich would be the 1200. And they would match with modern physical design.
Who really knows what was going through the mind of Commodore through the early 90's? The good news is that today we get to be able to use the machines, and speculate to our heart's content :)
@@TheRetroShack True.... However look at what systems Mehdi Ali was the man behind. I think that is a strong indication on what he wanted with the 600.
Originally there were two projects, the A250 which only ran on ROM cartridges and had no bootable media, and the A300, which could either boot from a flash drive or use a floppy drive. The suggestion of shipping games on PCMCIA cards was never taken seriously, as developers made it clear that games on ROM were too costly to make, which is why the A250 was canned pretty early in its developement.
Management was intent on killing the A500, as they hated the fact 3rd-party developers could make add-on cards for the A500 and that did not benefit Commodore's bottom line. The A600, with its PCMCIA slot, was the solution to screwing companies like GVP. Another one of Mehdi Ali's brilliant decisions.
Ultimately, the A600 was a decent machine, but way too expensive in its day due to the SMD manufacturing. The engineers insisted the machine would cost less to manufacture, because they didn't listen to their parts specialist, who warned them that SMD parts cost a fortune. Between management and the engineers, there was plenty of blame to go around for Commodore's failure.
@@Waccoon I know. The only true heroes are the engineers.
Sega and Nintendo were making big bucks at the time selling cartridge games. That's why. What they didn't have was built in floppy drives to make them rather easy to crack and copy. Unlike Amigas.
I kinda wish I had one still. The first thing I did with mine back in the day was drop a hard disk in from a dead laptop. But of all the Amigas that pcmcia slot future-proofed it somewhat.
I ended up just getting a pi400 which works ok has some benefits over the real thing mainly a single video output. I have a usb floppy drive somewhere I can't find it, I really wanna plug it in you can use them with real floppies. I'm not sure why I'd want to I don't even have any floppies. But I still go looking for that drive once in a while.
Where do you come down on the question of upgrading versus leaving stock? Personally, I think any upgrades made in the same spirit as those of the computer’s original use life are perfectly acceptable. It’s a pretty fuzzy concept, but my guideline is, if you imagine you’d have done it in the 90s, even if the specific upgrade is a modern solution to a retro problem, then it should be permissible. CPU and RAM upgrades were common, obviously hard drives were a common upgrade, too. I’d say a CF card in place of a hard drive is fine, because I absolutely would have gone for 4GB of silent storage over 80MB of clicky, rattly storage, if it had been available in the 90s, and it doesn’t really change how it works. I’d be fine with CPU accelerators, as there were a range of Power PC ones available at the time, and the modern solution would be an FPGA 68080 or something, but I’m kind of against the PiStorm upgrade that a lot of folks are doing right now, because that’s literally a whole other computer, running 68k code in software emulation. Emulation is a fine way to enjoy software, but I don’t see much difference between using a PiStorm, and gutting a functioning Amiga to use as a Pi case. It crosses a line, in my view.
It's an interesting question and I guess because I'm interested in new tech just as much as 'old' tech I am quite interested in seeing all these FPGA solutions etc. I love the Spectrum Next and things like the Pi Storm, but I also have computers that just like to keep original, or 'sympathetically' upgrade - as in; as if it were 'of it's time'. Really good question! Thanks :)
I agree with you whole heartedly. Having been planning on getting mine recapped I looked at all the upgrades but I too felt some would just make it pretty much another machine entirely which I don't think I like the idea of.
@@Tetlee I’m all for tricking out an Amiga as far as we can push it, but there are some upgrades I feel violate the spirit of the machine, if that’s a meaningful term. I’m not precisely sure where the line is, or even if it stays in the same place on a case by case basis. It’s a really vague sense. I guess it depends on how much of the original hardware is working, and how well it’s working.
The best Amiga ever made, my first Amiga and the only one in my collection of 9 Amigas that sits plugged in a desk next to me in my office ;)
I'm hoping that through this process I'm going to learn to love it too :) - At least until I get my hands on an A1200 :) :) Thanks for watching!
PS I love your channel and particularly the one about the BBC, i highest recommend an an acorn Archimedes as it simply blows me away every time I fire it up
@@leelangley3705 Archimedes coming up soon :) :) Glad you’re enjoying the channel :)
Back in the early 90s this machine was hot garbage and here in America all we can do is laugh at it. Now I have an appreciation for it because of the recent upgrades like the A630 available for it. The compact size makes an adorable little machine but I certainly would not want to use this as my daily driver
I bought one for around £300 (new) in Rotherham circa 1993, I was an avid fan of flight sims and was a bit annoyed about the lack of the numpad.
Apparently there was a 'software workaround' so you know that would have been terrible :)
This should have been instead of the A500 plus adding the ide options would have both given new users a lower priced entrance to the Amiga range and higher spaced Ram and HD options would have been a good jump up from original models.
There still would have been those compatibility issues and less numpad but adding an upgrade path without huge sidecar expansion would have been great.
It's a great looking machine, but a massive blunder. I think Commodore would have been spending the time, money and effort on getting the A1200 out of the door earlier (Xmas 91 would have been great). By 92 some Amiga owners I knew were starting to move to the PC. Then around 18months after the A600 came out Doom was released, Doom and the PC fragged Commodore, Atari and eventually Acorn.
So Doom Doomed the Amiga :)
I owned an A600 just because of it's compactness. It kind of gave me 'Psion organiser' vibes, and felt more of a solid machine compared to the A500. At the same time it did feel like a downgrade though.
You're right! It kind of does feel like the shorter, stockier, heavier little brother :) :)
Can you explain how it was a downgrade? Wasn’t it more that is wasn’t much of an upgrade? Was it because they got rid of the numeric keypad or were there other things?
@@OldAussieAds Yes the key pad removal made things a little less productive for software that benefited it.
@@OldAussieAds It also did away with the A500 side expansion slot, so it couldn't use any of the 'sidecar' expansions for the A500 - RAM upgrades, SCSI hard disks, 68020 & 68030 accelerators, the A570 CD-ROM drive. The trapdoor expansion slot was not compatible either, and I think it was a bit smaller (and therefore more awkwad to use, and harder to design cards that would fit) and there were very few expansion cards created for it. So you got an A500+, essentially, without the NUMPAD or expansion options, for a higher price. Admittedly there was the potential internal hard disk at a lower price than the external A500 ones, but that is about the only plus point in my view. I don't count the PCMCIA slot as a plus point because in the 1990s it was a bad alternative to the expansion slot; it is just a fluke, really, that it today has some use for modern removable storage devices.
What a lot of "500" was better or "just get a 1200" comments aren't considering is the price point, marketing and bundling of the A600 was its real masterstroke. I remember myself as a child and many of my friends it was just the easiest sell to your parents come Christmas. You couldn't ask for a 500 because it was "old" and there was tremeandous fear of investing in a machine that might become obsolete 6 months later which wasn't uncommon at the time. The 1200 was "the one for serious users". So the A600, piled sky high in every computer store with James Bond bundle packs and Batman bundle packs and the like was the obvious Christmas gift. All in one box was your computer, plenty of games to get you through to the Spring and an attractive price that just about sat in the average parent's "big present" budget it was perfect.
I had mine for years, well into the time when PC's and the internet was really becoming a thing and I remember my parents being very proud of their choice that I''d gotten so much fun time with games and school work done on this little machine that had outlasted every other fad present I'd ever asked for.
As with many things it's all about context not just raw specs.
We know it wasnt very well received at the time but has developed with age, the CF option throught the ide or pcmica or both makes it very useable nowadays for people wanting retro hardware and use modern computers to exchange data and software. With furia or vampire and maybe pistorm in the future the A600 is a very capable option. I use a A600 along side a A1200 running octamed and midi, mainly inspired by Pete Cannons tunes. My 600 has a Furia and it can easily hold its own today run many channels and record and play large samples , its never going to run Ableton or Crysis but its a retro machine with retro charm.
I'm certainly looking forward to getting this little machine up and running and getting to know it a lot better - maybe I'll end up loving it more than my A500? :)
Absolute stonkah video 😂❤️❤️❤️
Glad you enjoyed it :)
Funny you mention that the A600 only had a short life span . I bought one and only had it a few months before selling it for a A1200 .
The A600 was not that compatible with the A500 games as it was promised. I still have my A500 and 3 x A1200. 😍.
You are Still looking much better wearing the darker tops. 😉
Thanks - I try to take the advice on-board :)
I never fancied an A600. I had an A500+ with 2.0 ROM and extra RAM and most of my software was setup for using the keypad.
I seem to remember briefly owning an A600, but it was especially underwhelming to me, having had an A500 and A2000, I eventually got an A1200 as my last Amiga.
Thanks for sharing - I'm envious of your 1200 :) :)
@@TheRetroShack The Best AMIGA FOR HOME IS AMIGA 500+ / Amiga 1200
"The same sound as earlier Amigas" - erm, bit better for 2 reasons. 1st you can turn off the low pass 7KHz filter for Paula playback (more treble). 2nd you can play back samples with Paula at higher than 22KHz when displaying certain screen modes. The A1000 had neither and is a pig to upgrade them. The early A500 rev 3 also. I think rev 5 or 6 has the sound filter switch (dims LED) and you need a super Denise to get the funky screen modes for faster playback too (standard in A500+).
Wow! Now there a kick to the old memory - the LED light and sound filtering - I'd forgotten all about that but now remember it clear as day!
I have an older Amiga500 revision, with a red Power LED that even goes off when the filter is switched off.
A friend of mine owned a 600. Even back then we used to make fun of it :)
Such a shame really as I'm finding it to be quite a little cutie :) :)
Would the A600 mantained hardware compatibility with A500, then it would have been reasonable. Just a socket more, for the cpu, and the same expansion connector as the A500. Instead, changing everything for a machine with almost same specs, and phasing out lot of hardware, then yes it was really a bad decision. However, adding IDE was a nice move, indeed, as the standard (99%) PCMCIA slot.
Couldn't agree more :) Thanks for watching!
@@TheRetroShack Thanks for the passion! And looking forward for part 2! Cheers, M
Can't wait to see where you take this. With the price of A1200's going ballistic, the A600 really is a viable alternative. Let's face it, hardly anything uses AGA anyway ;) Shhhhh dont tell anyone ;)
Next part up tomorrow :)
How much would you pay for an Amiga 600 in 2023? I know someone selling one and it seems a bit high, but maybe I’m misunderstanding their rarity.
Am I a right Berk? Or, was that a reference to some claymation as you turned the Amiga over?
(newbie here, and really enjoying it)
Not consciously! I’ll have to watch it back :) Welcome aboard! Glad to have you here :)
I recall that Commodore didn't have much success in getting people to upgrade from the A500 to the A1200. Why upgrade when the A500 was doing what you wanted it to do? I belonged to a Amiga club where 1200 and 4000 were a tiny minority. Apple were successful in that they sold the idea of another model to do what the old model was doing anyway. The A600 was an oddity then , the added pcmcia card slot (pcmcia peripherals then were very expensive often more than the cost of the A600 and often weren't compatible with the Amiga) . I think it was a way of getting a500 to upgrade as the added ide harddrive was something the A500 users wanted. I do find the keypad on A500 a bit silly.
A bit silly? But how else would it be taken seriously as a business machine? Oh yeah - it wasn't :) But I still LOVE the Amiga 500 more than any other Amiga, mostly because it was what I had growing up I guess :)
@@TheRetroShack An Amiga dealer told me in the mid 90s that people hanging on to A500s and not buying A1200s was going to send him broke, It did. I just bought an A600 from ebay..
@@anthonybarbati9969 Hope you enjoy your new 600 :) :)
@@TheRetroShack The A600 has arrived!!! I found an A600 once amongst footpath rubbish, I took home and for some reason I latter threw it out.....and probably much for the reason the original owner threw it out....
It was the IDE interface that sold it to my brother-in-law... laptop PC hard drive.... so much cheaper than SCSI. I remember now, he had so many upgrades in there it was pretty much impossible to screw the case back together.
..... OH....now you mention the 1200... I don't think it was a 600 at all... :/
Funny! :)
I wonder if the rust RF modulator is a feature? Mine look the same
The Amiga at the start has to be the whitest one I've ever seen lol.
;)
8:03 pointed pliers? Oh boy.... :)
four 8bit sound channels each with a 6 bit volumn control, so 14bitsp per channel if linear and per not shared..
Didn't like not having the numberpad. Only one of the amigas I never owned.
my amiga was a 600 ,, then a 2000 with a pc emulator card in it ,, then i got a pc 486dx
I went straight from the A500 to an 80286 :) Bit of a shock to the system!
Mouser sells brand new 512 SSD drives so you just need an adapter to ide for it to work
Why is the RF shield useless in this day and age? I keep those in but then again I use CRTs for my old machines, so maybe that's a factor?
Well, as I’ve learned recently - they’re not useless at all. They still impact Radio signals so if you live near any amateur radio buffs you’ll be potentially annoying them. But for the most part modern equipment is susceptible to RF interference than older stuff so it’s largely seen as an overkill these days. I’m sure the amateur radio folks will set me right if I’ve gotten any of that wrong :)
@@TheRetroShack Yes I've been looking into this a bit. I've been purchasing a few Atari 2600 games and those who don't have an RF shield in the cart seem more blurry and the audio gets the occasional "wweeeeaarrrooouuggg" weird audio
nterference once in a while. I'm trying to make some home made shields with mild success so far, but we'll see. I have at least 2 radio stations less than a minute walk from my place but I doubt that's what is interfering. When I use the scanner, the radio waves are very dense on many frequencies here and there are many AR users all over the place here. I'll have to ask them if Jungle Hunt is screwing up their Sunday transmissions ;)
Typical later period Commodore - somethi9ng that is technically a really good idea, but business wise was spectacularly badly handled. If it was £100 cheaper, it would have sat well next to the 1200 once that came out. As it was, we all saw 600s sitting next to 1200s with only £100 difference.
I've always thought it's the nicest looking Amiga.
Yep - can't disagree about it being a cute little thing!
it should have been an AGA at the least.... Would have helped fuel more advanced games...
The A500+ was far superior to this, the best part of this was the IDE drive, but at the time, everyone wanted SCSI as it was miles faster. My A1200 (after my A500+) was even better still, whacked a Blizzard 030+882 FPU+SCSI and this thing could overheat like nothing. Had to put it into a PC case, which took ages and cost way too much and was never quite right, i.e. PC keyboard adapter.
Sounds like a monster! Thanks for watching :)
@@TheRetroShack It couldn't run Linux at the time without overheating and the machine shutting down. Wish I'd kept it now, and I wish I'd kept my A4000 which wasn't anywhere near as speedy, but hey ho.
@@TheRetroShack P.S: The Blizzard was a 50MHz 030 with MMU, the maths libs could also utilise the FPU transparently, which was nice :)
Needed a proper upgrade. If 1200 came out then , then maybe it could have helped?
I’m not sure though as even the 1200s games look worse than mega drive and snes.
Yep, imagine if they just spent all the money they spent on the A600 into making the 1200 truly amazing! :)
@@TheRetroShack yeah . The 68020 and 2meg ram was good . The AGA , not so much.
I guess it’s the issue of trying to be all things to all people.
Makes it financially difficult to compete with something( e.g consoles) , that can only do one thing.
Get yourself a 5mm hex nut spinner if you're doing this sort of thing a lot, instead of attacking them with pliers :)
Got one somewhere but it wasn’t to hand so I was extra gentle and no nuts were harmed in the production of this episode :) :)
I never understood what Commodore was doing. Releasing the same machine over and over, The A1000, 2000, 500, 500+, 600, they're all the same 7MHz 68000 machines.
Me either :) :). Probably why back in the day I only ever had the A500
Well the A2000 was a very important improvement over the A1000, despite being a simple one and the CPU remaining the same. The A2000 and A500 are essentially the two versions of the A1000 that should have existed in the first place, though to be fair they made these more cost effective versions with experience under their belt. The A2000 has many internal Zorro slots (Zorro II in fact, a faster bus than the A1000/A500 side slot) and a couple of ISA slots for adding a PC bridgeboard. That encouraged a wave of expansion cards for the Amiga and made it more successful as a productivity machine, and it also had a larger case that could accomodate an internal hard disk and two floppy drives, including a 5.25" one (useful if using the PC bridgeboard because a lot of PC drives were 5.25" and continued to be into the early 1990s). Also, the main advantages of the Amiga lay in its custom chips; to some extent the processor was not very important for a lot of usage, certainly not compared to PCs or Macs where the CPU was doing most of the work. The A500/A600 didn't need to have a faster processor (though double the clock speed would have been nice for early 3D games like flight sims, to run at a nicer frame rate), they needed to have the right timing for the custom chips to do their thing optimally, to be compatible with the existing library of software and to be very affordable, all of which the 68000 @7Mhz provided. What neb said is also true, however. They were not in great financial shape after launching the A1000 and axed a huge amount of staff, including most Amiga staff, which left them a bit crippled in their ability to keep enhancing the Amiga, and those original staff who remained drifted away as Commodore refused to make improvements because of cost fears.
Why will you not require the RF shield? As a licensed radio amateur, all I can say is, I'm glad you do not live next door to me, or I'd give you an abject lesson on why it is required.... with Ofcom to back me up.
Yes it’’s been a bit of an education reading some of the comments here and I must admit I didn’t realise that removing the shields these days could cause this kind of issue. Don’t worry - it’s going back in :)
@@TheRetroShack People think radio is a thing of the past, mainly through ignorance that is not their fault. It's not a thing of the past. Digital radio is not immune to RFI. It just behaves differently. With a digital radio signal you won't "hear" the interference. The only clue you will have that it is there, is when the noise floor reaches a level sufficient to just render the signal unusable, at which point, it will just disappear. So in other words.. that's DRB radio, which is still radio _(why anyone wants DRB is beyond me, as it sounds bloody awful)._ Analogue radio is of course still widely used, and not just by people like me either. Air traffic uses AM _(the modulation mode that is the most susceptible to interference)_ for regional ATC and SSB for transatlantic HF comms. While being phased out, VOR navigation beacons use AM too. Analogue FM is still widely used for domestic radio broadcasts, and even things like car key fob remote locking uses simple PCM at UHF frequencies that can easily be interfered with by harmonics from computer clock generators if not shielded. While far less likely to be interfered with by an Amiga, a modern PC with poor shielding will easily interfere with 4 or 5G cell phones... and yes... those are just radios too. Radio is not a thing of the past.
I'm sure you've had a good written lashing over this already, but the HF radio spectrum is under assault from a deluge of crap Chinese devices (mainly switched mode power supplies) that are just making short wave radio communication problematic. There's also the ignorance displayed in people using power line Ethernet adaptors that send data over the domestic power supply. They're evil. Even broadband itself is deafening the HF radio spectrum because here in the UK we're backward, and still use a balanced twisted copper pair to transit RF up to 14MHz or higher _(Yes, your broadband is radio frequency over copper wires even if you've been conned into thinking you are on "fibre")._ Basically... HF radio signals are being pumped through coper wires, hundreds of metres long, usually suspended in the air _(thus making great antennas for HF)_ from telegraph poles ... it's a nightmare. This is why I opt to get shafted by Virgin for my ISP as they use a buried coaxial cable to the house, and not the stupid ancient twisted pair designed to carry essentially nothing more than an audio signal.
Please respect radio. You'll miss it once it's been rendered useless by ever increasing noise levels that authorities are sweeping under the carpet in order to make short term profits.
I'm glad you appreciate the problem.
David G0SLV
Oh...and also... that RF shield is there to prevent your Amiga being interfered with as much as the other way around, and that is FAR more likely these days than it was in the 1990s when it was built.
after having A500 for years there is no reason A600 or A1200. it was windows 95 time and go for pc huge 120MB hard drive xD but 30 years laters ofc i have 2xA500 A1200 commodore64. and best part my first a500 still working xD just wanted replace floppy drive. end of amiga lifetime i had no button on it i needed something to push floppy out. so bought used floppydrive with a500 included xD.
sure i have accelator card on A500 and installed 3.1 first time. then came 3.1.4 had to have it. then came 3.2.
i relized it money trap. its 3.1 but things from aminet in same pack. new versions coming. sure downloaded it lol. later bought it never used in real machine. and yes hate 3.9 and magicwb stuff. 3.1 is nice and 3.2 looks better
think still have 3.1.4. with working gcc and assembly. it is just easier use winuae.
wish there would be easier to get C or assembly back then. i not actually even knew them LOL only would need magazine with floppy or book but there was no floppies. well guess they too big for A500 without harddisk
GoEX as an HD Replacement?
I thought the GoEX was an FDD replacement with the Flashfloppy firmware? I'll double check. For the HDD I've gone for a nice, simple IDE to CF Card adapter :)
Commodore should have skipped the A500+ and A600 and went from the A500 to the A1200 and released it around 1990 with a few better specs like double the storage on the floppy drive and 8 channel audio chip whiles also having better graphic capabilities then the A1200 did.
In the end, Commodore wasted time and money on machines that were more or less the same whiles not doing enough progress to keep up with rivals and for a company that was way ahead of rivals with the first Amiga, it really shows what poor management can do to a company.
Spot on!
I had the 600 and it was awesome!!
So long story short Commodore pulled an Acorn and instead of keeping the innovation train going they decided to back pedal hence the A600 was born not offering really anything over the A500 other than a new 2.0 kickstart rom and a bunch of incompatible issues with A500 software. Commodore made a big mistake with this and the underwhelming A1200 which should have been allowed to be AAA not AGA. But then looking at who was running the show ( NOT A DEV / TECH GUY ) and yeah the writing is on the wall.
Spot on!
AAA cost a fortune, though. It followed a "kitchen sink" philosophy and was way too much hardware for what it offered. There was never a use for it except in high-end machines, and that all came to an end after the disastrous launch of the A3000.
@@Waccoon I am sure the hardware dev's might have a few interesting comments on that. Given that the onslaught of hardware development for the PC was rampant from 386/486/pentium and its parts ISA to PCI IDE and SCSI having better hardware and thus higher performing software would be paramount. So the question would be without either how does one compete when you are being out gunned?.
@@sethrd999 PCI didn't exist when AAA was in development, IDE didn't have DMA support, and SCSI required its own dedicated DMA controller to be fast. Intel's standards weren't better by a longshot. Remember that Commodore was a billion dollar company at the time and had their own line of PC clones using custom chips. Commodore wasn't out-gunned, they (both management and the engineers) just made really bad decisions. They also wasted a huge amount of time and money designing computers nobody wanted, like more 8-bit machines, and a dedicated UNIX system based on (of all things) a Zilog CPU. WTF? Commodore refused to focus on the Amiga.
AAA was doomed from the start because it tried to suit low-end DRAM systems, high-end VRAM systems, and maintain backwards compatibility with OCS at the same time. It also still required external bus hardware whether the system had expansion slots or not, because Commodore wanted to use AAA with both 68K and 88K CPUs, which were not bus compatible. Back then, you couldn't make an affordable computer with 8+ custom chips targeting multiple CPUs and both single and dual-ported memory. That was crazy. On top of that, AAA was supposed to include a DSP, which requires dedicated memory of its own. Even most arcade machines at the time didn't have that much hardware!
You have to read the specs and schematics to understand what a mess AAA was. Nobody was keeping costs under control.
AA+ and Hombre was the reasonable way forward, but by the time Commodore figured out that strategy, they were out of money and couldn't make it happen. Too bad, since Hombre was designed to use OpenGL right from the start, and I can only imagine how different the world would have been today had we skipped the decade "3D accelerators" and proprietary APIs like Glide.
@@Waccoon What ever we describe as good / bad hardware decisions etc etc is really moot since Commodore through serious bad management failed. They needed a strategy and did not come up with one thus did not evolve so any arguments now are purely semantic..
Amiga Rulez
:)
Why the A600? Because it's the small version of the A3000, with the same chipset, silly! :)
That really paints a nice picture of the A600. More accurately, it was the small version of the A500+ without the expansion potential at a higher price! :)
They might as well at least give it aga
:) The wisdom of Commodore :)
Then you need enough RAM to make use of it. Even the A1200 was underpowered when putting AGA to good use with just 2mb of Chip RAM. A 1mb AGA machine would be pointless because in practice you wouldn't be able to achieve more than a 1mb ECS machine.
@@danyoutube7491 they could have made it with two mb also, you could then chose between two formats. What happened was people buying a A600 and a few months later A1200 was out, what a bummer
Was there really any point in going to the considerable effort of removing the RF shield.
Yep - When I clean something - it knows it's been cleaned :) :)
The 600 was a weird evolution from the Amiga 500, and imo was not as good. However it was the sexiest of any Amiga, and belongs on the wall or mantle piece to oogle
Mostly true, although I'm too nervous to put my A600 out on display due to the risk of yellowing.
Weird is a good adjective to use! Personally, nothing outshines the A500 for me (except perhaps a BBC Micro) :)
I don't like the A600 purely for cosmetic reasons..A500 looks more pleasing to the eye...A1200 made sense but the 600 was pointless in my opinion.
2nd!
So, are you a convert as well, or do you just hate the thing too?
Personally, I wouldn't mind one. I've never had an Amiga.
Difficult to say at the moment as it's all in bits awaiting the capacitors to arrive :) I'll reserve judgment for part 2 (or maybe part 3 when it's all modded up :) )
@@TheRetroShack You're planning on doing the recap yourself!? Absolute madlad. 😁
Feel like undusting my Amiga 600HD
Go for it - you can give me some advise on good 600 friendly games to try :)
I have two of them and I hate them both.
So. Many. Questions... :) :)
@@TheRetroShack Bad caps, IDE disintegrated, PCMCIA never worked, RGB (no R), B/W composite with noise, no numeric.
:-D
@@104d_3rr0r_vince Ouch! I feel your pain!
I hate all my Amigas, they make me laugh when I compare them with my Acorn 32 bit workstations.
@@Archimedes75009 We know that Zarchos, talk to your therapist about Shadow of the Beast.
The Amiga 500 was arguably the most beautiful pieace of kit Commodore ever produced, next possibly to the 1581 disk drive for the C-64/128. The Amiga 600 was... not. It's an ugly beast and the runt of the litter.
You discover a 85MB hard disk and say 'nice without any intention of using it, slightly confused there..
Anyways... People Can't Memorise Computer Industry Acronyms
Nice A600. Gotek is so lame. Floppy disks or nothing;)
Just another farce from the toy computer manufacturer, Commodore.
And yet it could do Shadow of the Beast........Still waiting for the Archimedes 8mhz 512k version lol
@@Galahadfairlight stamp size 288x192 display with no AI.
Still waiting for your 32x32 bouncing balls demo. I even give you 8 Mbytes of fast ram, your tortoise won't beat the Archie anyway.
Good to see a 30 year old debate still going strong :) :)
@@Archimedes75009 no idea what you're talking about, but its a matter of record on EAB that you took up the challenge over TWO years ago to get a 512k 8mhz Archimedes to do Beast.
Never mind any faux challenges, you have yet to achieve this one, we all know why, and maybe when you've reached adult maturity, you will understand why it is the Amiga can sleepwalk through a game like Beast, and an Arc will struggle.
You'll eat your "toy computer" jibe.
Either complete the challenge or back down, because no-one has another year for your excuses as to why it is you can't do it.
Tick tick, times running out for you.
@@Galahadfairlight All wrong, but people who know you won't be surprised. You can't do Beast on the Amoeba in 352 x 258 btw, so don't compare this hilarious 'low spec' sort of a game and what I am working on ( when I have the time and the will. )
It is a little bit more challenging than your pale 25 fps ST games conversions ROTFL