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opinions on the Amiga 600

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tipc

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Had one now for a long time, years. Turned it on, it works. Has a h/d. Takes cflash drives (probably none of the newer ones I own though, maybe I'm wrong).

What do I do w/it? Is it fun? Must be. I hear some people poo-poo it. Others say the quality is equivalent to the 500.

It is a cutey. Me likes it. But what do I do w/it? Did I repeat myself...
 
The knock on the A600 at the time was that it didn't do anything to improve on the A500. And it didn't have as many options for expanding it, since most of the chips were soldered to the board rather than socketed. That was a cost-reducing measure.

But today, the advantage of an A600 is that it has an IDE interface built in, and its compact size is more of an advantage now than a disadvantage. You can put a CF card in there as a hard drive to have very fast, silent storage, and it'll run pretty much any software an A500 would. You might want to look at putting a Kickstart switch in there so you can switch between a 1.3 and a 2.x ROM for compatibility purposes.

Most of us don't have limitless space, so a fully functional Amiga in a package not much bigger than a PC keyboard is a nice thing. The biggest disadvantage to an A600 is that you're much more limited as far as what accelerator boards will work in it, but that's less of an issue today too, since most of the software you're likely to want to run was made with the stock 7 MHz 68000 in mind.
 
Hi there

Thought I'd drop in and add a little to whats been said. Depending on what Rom's you have on the motherboard, the A600 may or may not register it's IDE port as the early rom's didn't come with the SCSI.Device code to use them. You can install 3.1 roms, this will greatly improve the machines hard driver performance. However it will cost the backwards compatibilty with older A500 games. To get the onboard IDE port to work you will need atleast version V37.350 of the 2.05 roms. Hard to find as a lot of people just binned their old roms after updating to 3.1.

You can also buy a new 030 accelerator from Amigakit, but you can only use a CF card for storage once it's installed.

It all comes down to what you want to spend on your machine, the a600 is a great little gaming machine. I have one here with the 3.1 roms, HD and ram expansion. The short fall i found was after Workbench is loaded there's very little chip memory on a stock 600, to run applications, without the ram expansion card. These will put you back up £30-40, last time i checked. Definitely recommend you look on the Amigakit website for goodies, tho it does get pricey.

Hope some of that helps
 
It's also important to keep in mind that WHDLoad, while it doesn't completely eliminate Kickstart ROM compatibility issues, goes a long way to mitigate them. It is, IMO, the only way to fly with an Amiga these days.
 
Just to add another thought... depending upon your location, you might find it easier/cheaper to sell the A600 on eBay and pick up an A1200 instead. In the USA, for example, A600's seem to garner a premium as there weren't many that were sold here. In the UK, they seem to be almost commonplace. That said, an A1200 allows more expansion than an A600, but you'll still pay for both the system and the expansion.

Ultimately, it comes down to your intended use. If you already had/have a working HD in your A600, then you're set... toss in a CF card, WHDLoad a few games, and have fun. If you're wanting to turn it into a serious working machine, you'll need 3.1 roms, an accelerator, and a good RAM expansion - then you're ready to upgrade to a newer OS and use it for a daily driver.
 
Just about ti get one of these. No hdd, is UK version with AV connectors and came with a bunbled with a lot of software. Quite looking forward to getting it:

Mouse
Quickshot Joystick
Plastic protective cover
Amiga 600 hand Book
Using the Amiga Workbench Manual as New
Basic Interpreter manual and
disks:
Extras
Workbench
Fonts
Pro Vector 2.1

Games:

Alien 3 1 x Music -X
Turrican 3 1 x K240
Bump & Burn 1 x Las Vegas
Kings Quest V1 1 x Ninja Spirit
Skidmarks 1 x Alien Breed
Star Wars 1 x Barbarian 2
Ultimate Golf 1 x Ninja Rabbits
Super Fighter ( 5 Disks no 2 missing )
Cannon Soccer 1 x Grand Prix
Deluxe paint 3 1 x Pushover
Putty 1 x Driving Force
Blood Money 1 x Space Gun
Prince of Persia
Beneath a steel Sky
John Barnes European Football

Astra Pack Games:

Data Storm
E-Motion
Monster
Kid Gloves
Power Play
RVF Honda
Shuffle Puck
Soccer
Tower of Babel
Knights of the Sky
amiga1.jpgAmiga2.jpg
 
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600 was developed as a cost reduced 500 that ended up being more expensive than the 500 and less expandable (though some common expansions were already included in the case with the built-in hard drive controller). It has 2MB chip ram where a 500 only has 1MB (limitation of the Agnus chip) unless you can get a DKB megachip or equivalent which are hard to find.

Back in the day the 600 got a bad name due to the inability to use 500 side expansions or processor accelerators the latter due to its using a different 68000 than the 1000, 500, 2000, CDTV which both could not be pulled out to place a board in the socket and was a different shape (square instead of rectangle). This limitation is less important today since even accelerators for the 500 are extremely rare and extremely expensive. It also lacked the numeric keypad which effected some games which used a lot of keyboard commands like the flight simulators. Lastly, back when the 600 was introduced 2.5" IDE hard drives were much more expensive than the 3.5" used by Amiga 500 sidecar expansion boxes. All added up to make it not be the best choice at the time.

Today, 2.5" IDE drives are cheap and plentiful, and you can get a 2.5" IDE to CF adapter allowing you to use a CF card instead of drive for quieter, faster and cooler running.

PCMCIA cards back in the day were also expensive, but now you can use a PCMCIA CF card adapter with drivers to transfer files from PC to the 600 easily where getting them to a 500 is much harder. You can also use some network or wireless network cards with drivers on aminet though the 68000 limits how much you can do with it. Still, useful for Amiga Explorer transfers of files to and from your PC assuming the TCP stacks will run on the unexpanded 600 (not sure of this only ever done this on a 1200).

You can take an adf file from your PC and using the CF card get it to the 600 where programs like adf2disk can write that to an actual Amiga floppy for booting and playing on the Amiga. This is one of the huge plusses to a 600 or 1200.

So, yes the 600 can run a lot of games. If you add a kickstart switch, you will not be able to access any of the 600 specific hardware in 1.3 like the hard drive but you probably won't need it in 1.3 since you would likely only be using that to boot a game and that would be from floppy and honestly most games will run without fiddling with it at all.
 
My main reason for getting it is the collection of original disks and manuals. The last Commadore machine the family had was a C64, well a couple. I like the idea of using a CF card but for the time being it'll just be floppy only and wont be expanding it anytime soon.
 
600 is not a bad little machine for that, and retains value better than some of the others.

Amusing how the black sheep models tend to be worth more later on. Atari 1200XL, Apple III, Apple Lisa, and the Amiga 600 were all roundly disliked at the time, had some issues, and therefore sold relatively poorly and now can command good prices when someone goes to sell them.
 
I suspect over time folk come to the realisation they aren't as bad as the hoo haa at the time made them out to be. I was always quite envious of the Amiga range but never actually got around to getting one for a number of reasons. Well to tell the truth I'm cheap and folk kept throwing old x86 kit at me ;). This bundle came at a reasonable price compared to the 500s so jumped at it. It'll compliment my RiscPCs and 486s quite nicely. Looking around the net some folk have done some quite interesting "upgrades".
 
I think it ends up being a bit of that, but also that the changing times or the actions of the company to correct the problems made the machines better than their original release but the bad name they had by them kept the machines form selling well.

When the 600 was released 2.5"hard drives were expensive as were PCMCIA cards. Now, you can get both for the 600/1200 cheaply making them the lease expensive 68k Amigas to get online or at least networked for file transfers using something like Amiga Explorer. You also didn't have compact Flash which with PCMCIA adapters you can use to easily transfer files now back and forth with laptops and desktops with the right card readers.

Then, of course, rarity also ends up increasing the value at a point.
 
Thanks for the input. I'm glad I'm getting it then. The last of the 68k line as it were. Seems failure rate was reduced compared to the 500 but of course it's a bit more difficult to repair. I've tracked down to service manual complete with schematics. Hopefully it has the later rom revision.

Looking at some of the old ads is humorous. Lots of different bundling options. With any luck it'll be delivered in the next few days.
 
It turned up today. A very compact unit indeed. The joystick had a broken contact leaf so apart from that and a few disks being a bit suspect it's all good. Thought the mouse left button wasn't working at first but held down both buttons on start up and was presented with the bios screen. I suspect the contact just needs a clean. It's a later revision one, s/n 9900## which is great. Nothing in the trap door.

Looking at the software it was the 'Wild, Weird and Wicked' bundle which included Formula One Grand Prix, Pushover, Putty and Deluxe Paint III. There's a leaflet with Deluxe Paint mentioning about some functions being unusable because of the lack of numeric key pad.

Link to a nice noobs guide to the A600 here

A600 and many other Amiga related service manuals and schematics here
 
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I do remember it about the Amiga, that a surprising number of serious utilities demanded (or were not fully usable without) the keypad and a math coprocessor (FPU). Also the sole expansion of RAM gave the machine a 2x speedup on the same CPU. That's because the builtin RAM, aka Chip RAM, was all video memory - as in the PC Jr. The extension RAM (installed under the trap door) is called Fast RAM - if you boot to Workbench (2.0+) the amount of free memory of both kinds is always visible on top of the screen.

Well, but all this, had of course no meaning whatsoever in regard to playing most classic games which were optimized for exactly the configuration of a barebones A600. So this was an almost perfect gaming machine, better than consoles because of the availability of keyboard and mouse for input, while more serious usage demanded much more investment (an A1200 with CPU+FPU+RAM+HDD upgrade and a multisync monitor would be a good bet)
 
Caluser2000 said:
It turned up today. A very compact unit indeed. The joystick had a broken contact leaf so apart from that and a few disks being a bit suspect it's all good. Thought the mouse left button wasn't working at first but held down both buttons on start up and was presented with the bios screen. I suspect the contact just needs a clean. It's a later revision one, s/n 9900## which is great. Nothing in the trap door.
Click to expand...

Good news for you is, they make a real nice new trapdoor ram expansion, and you WANT that trapdoor RAM since without it you only have 1MB of the 2MB Chip ram. Trapdoor RAM in the 600 is chip RAM, not fast RAM, but it does give it the full compliment of Chip RAM which Amigas like. Commodore loved to ship low end Amigas with half the Chip RAM standard and with a dedicated port to add the rest. Amiga 1000 came with 256k with a port on the front for the additional 256k and the 500 with 512k and the second 512k in the trapdoor RAM slot (though some came out with boards that could put up to 4MB here they needed an additional connection up to the motherboard to connect up the additional fast RAM) Can be found here http://amigakit.leamancomputing.com/catalog/product_info.php?cPath=25&products_id=1038

Advantage to this new one over looking for one used on ebay or the like is that it has two clock ports for additional expansions and a connector for an internal flicker fixer.
 
I'd forgotten how patient you had to be for games to load. Got an external fdd and servicable joystick on their way. I'm quite happy running it through the large big screen telly in the lounge at the moment even though I have to negotiate with "er in doors" for it ;)

As I mentioned in a earlier I've got some RiscPCs(600 & 700) and 486s(all dx2/66s). One of the 486s is running OS/2 v3. It actually remotely runs dos games off a win98 "server" quite well. I'd be cool to get the A600 networked at some point just for bragging rights. No hurry though as I've almost spent this years "hobby" budget. I guess something like a mid range 286(or low end 386SX) would be interesting to compare with the A600 performance wise.

Did a bit of research a while ago and it seems Amiga software developers had a hand at helping IBM in coming up with OS/2s WPS in exchange for REXX.
 
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KeefTheThief said:
Commodore loved to ship low end Amigas with half the Chip RAM standard and with a dedicated port to add the rest.
Click to expand...

Nice. I mean the fact that my dusty A1200 wasn't a "low end Amiga" (considering the full Chip RAM compliment). I guess I have to thank the A600 for that ;).
 
michal said:
Nice. I mean the fact that my dusty A1200 wasn't a "low end Amiga" (considering the full Chip RAM compliment). I guess I have to thank the A600 for that ;).
Click to expand...

My guess is that by the time the 1200 came out, RAM prices had dropped so far that a dedicated port to add 1MB of RAM to it likely cost as much as the 1MB of RAM. Or C= finally realized no one wanted a hobbled Amiga.
 
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