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opinions on the Amiga 600

I've never laid hands on a a real Amiga 600. Every other model, but not that one. Dunno if I have even seen one in real life. They're small, I could justify squeezing one into my collection on that basis....:p
 
I saw that. A very good job.

An external fdd arrived today. I'll test that out tomorrow. It has a pass through connector with on/off switch. How many of these could be daisy chained? The joystick hasn't arrived yet.
 
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The external fdd works fine. Formatted some old 720k disks I was given and made a copy of the Workbench disk. Started it up and had a good look at what was on offer. Now I can understand what Amiga fans were on about with regards to what was on offer by the "PC" world in the late 80s early 90s. Plug n play off the bat on 16 bit architecture, a graphical mutlitasking OS on 880k etc. Of course it's all history now. The speach synth is a hoot. Having CLI (Shell)option available as well obviously is an advantage though most of what's needed is in the menu.

Was quite surprise how high you could set the baud rate up on the serial port as well considering most modems where a lot less but I guess the main purpose was file transfers between machines. When I get the 286/10 I think I'll do a one/ one comparison- comparing hardware, software and upgradablity.
 
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michal said:
Whenever I see one, can't escape the feeling it was supposed to be a notebook. I just read someone had that feeling too.
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Silent Paws actually sold a kit to turn the Amiga 1200 into a "laptop" by taking the Motherboard and keyboard and loading them into the case which had a LCD screen. If you look at the two machines, 600 and 1200 with the use of SMT, PCMCIA and 2.5" hard drives it does see they were trying to head toward being able to sell an amiga laptop ala STacy but never quite got there. My understanding is that even though most of the hardware was heading there the custom chips would have had to be redone to be more energy efficient to really make it work well in a laptop under battery. As a result of having to use the 1200 MB and keyboard the unit was rather huge and ungainly compared to a true laptop.

http://www.bboah.com/index.php?action=artikel&cat=7&id=1891&artlang=en

They also were developing a luggable 4000 don't entirely recall if that was released or not and the sites about Amiga hardware list a Silent Paws 600 but with no information. I assume if they had been developing a 600 version it didn't get into production probably because of the low sales of the model.
 
Caluser2000 said:
An external fdd arrived today. I'll test that out tomorrow. It has a pass through connector with on/off switch. How many of these could be daisy chained? The joystick hasn't arrived yet.
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I'm pretty sure you could chain at least three external floppy drives if you wanted.

Caluser2000 said:
Now I can understand what Amiga fans were on about with regards to what was on offer by the "PC" world in the late 80s early 90s. Plug n play off the bat on 16 bit architecture, a graphical mutlitasking OS on 880k etc. Of course it's all history now. The speach synth is a hoot. Having CLI (Shell)option available as well obviously is an advantage though most of what's needed is in the menu.
Click to expand...

Yes, when I bought my Compaq 486 in 1994 after a few years with an Amiga, the Compaq felt like a step down in several regards. Its plug and play was a joke, and Windows 3.1 wasn't as stable as Amiga OS 2.x and only offered cooperative multitasking. On my Amiga I would load up applications until I ran out of memory and just keep stuff open, pretty much how I use a modern PC. I couldn't use Windows 3.1 like that. Two months later I bought OS/2 3.0, and finally felt like I hadn't wasted $1,400 on my then-new PC.

Dave Haynie (one of the Amiga designers) has said the Amiga singlehandedly dragged the desktop PC from the 1970s into the mid 1990s. I agree with him.

Was quite surprise how high you could set the baud rate up on the serial port as well considering most modems where a lot less but I guess the main purpose was file transfers between machines. When I get the 286/10 I think I'll do a one/ one comparison- comparing hardware, software and upgradablity.
Click to expand...

I don't remember if the Amiga's theoretical limit was 38.4K or 115K. But I think they were trying to avoid repeating the mistake they made with the C-64, which topped out at 1200 bps and only went higher with some heroic software tricks.
 
Serial port speed can be effected by CPU speed on the Amiga but there is the Surf Squirrel if you can find it that adds both SCSI and a high speed Serial port using the PCMCIA port on the 600/1200 (there might be a clock port serial board also). Otherwise, on an unexpanded 600, you might not be able to push the serial port over 36000.
 
Both items work just dandy. Playing Prince of Persia to test out the joystick. Looking at wikipedia with regards to Workbench 2.05 it mentions there should be 4 disks-Workbench, Extras, Fonts and Install disks. I've only got the first three. If I decide to go the CF card route for Hdd is this install disk needed?

Edit: Found a guide showing how to do it. You can use HDInstalTools from Aminet. Then boot from the WB disk, enter the command line and COPY DF0 TO DH0 ALL CLONE : QUIET
Would be nice to have the Install disk though.
 
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