Commodore Amiga 600 (A600) Review
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
- My Review of the Amiga A600
The Amiga 600 was the successor to the popular Amiga 500 machine.
The A600 was the final model of the original or non AGA line of Amiga Computers based on the Motorola 68000 CPU and the ECS chipset. It features a very small form factor, 1 Meg of Chip Ram and a PCMCIA expansion port.
Amiga OS 2.0 comes out of the box.
This is a review of my A600 system and the expansions i have bought for it.
Back when I was still a young kid, I once saw an Amiga600 on a flea market along with a printer, lots of disks, joysticks and whatnot for like... 30-60 bucks (not sure anymore).
My mom refused to pick it up because she had no idea how to transport all the stuff back home :,(
'til this day I haven't got hands on real Amiga computers, wish so though, especially the 600 since it's so compact.
Nice setup and nice review :) I have the exact same setup in my Amiga 600 except I also have the Indivision ECS plugged into the A604 card. I had to use the small grounding screws that came with my ACA 620 to get a really secure connection or else my A600 would not be stable. Really great setup for gaming. does take up alot less space VS A500 + ACA 500 or A1200. I have all of these systems with accelerators and stuff.
Edit: Oh, you can set what quit key you want to use in each game or do as I and set it to use the 'del' key for all games. You set this up in the whdload startup file
I had an A600 around the year 1992 when it came out, one of the most popular games of the time which I still play today is IT CAME FROM THE DESERT by cinemaware. But to be honest what really killed an interest in the Amiga I find was when Wolfenstein 3D first appeared on the PC followed by Doom. When these games arrived they we're the biggest thing since sliced bread and everyone wanted to play these games and people just put there Amiga's to sleep for good. I believe I still have mine in storage somewhere.
Wow thats an amazing A600
I had the amiga 500 600 and 1200 , with thosands of games and stacks of boxes with disks , worst part is , i dont remember what happened to them ...... and i dont recall selling them to nobody , its so mindboggling to think of , where they heck did all of it go....
Exactly what I have planned for my A600 :) Nice mods there :)
+Michael Oglesby thanks! - yeah the 020 makes the A600 a nippy little machine. great for WHDLoad.
star wipe!
Can you play audio files on this computer?
Be careful, youll turn that into a time machine ! 👀
I love winuae running it with my amd ryzen system which is far faster than any original amiga and better display output :-)
Me too. Still miss my amiga 500 and amiga 4000. Running an emulator just isnt the same. Not willing to pay alot for old hardware either, so winuae will have to do. The price for a used amiga is just insane here atm, and most of them dont even work. And even if they do, you really dont know how long they will stay that way being that old. I wouldnt mind an amiga 500, as they are easy to fix, if the price was alright.
I loved my Amiga 600 with an external drive and small portable TV, it was the perfect size for my little room when I was at university.
I purchased my Amiga A600 in April 1994 whilst at University aged 18. It was so much better than the computers we were coding on. I still Code my 600, still use it regularly. My kids like it. It has done well for almost 25 years of use. My favourite computer of all time.
Nice one Iain, by the sounds of it, I’m pretty much the same age as you and remember getting the A600 for Christmas back in ‘Nam. Still have one to this day and subject my boys to Nitro and Lotus when they have Forza Horizon!
My first computer ♥️ I had so much fun on my Amiga 600 when I was 4 I'm now 28 good to see these systems are still around.. So many amazing games too dizzy the egg,zool,Brian the lion,tear away Thomas,duck tales, earthworm Jim and loads more great to see the workings of this system as an adult great vid very informative 👌
Premiere ,Wing Commander ,Birds of Prey , Microprose GRAND PRIX (one of the all time best F1 sims), New Zealand Story + Turrican 2 best platformers of that time imo ... though I had only an A500+ and I played those games on it
4:48 The struggle is real. Imagine Apple I owners:
"I sure miss my Apple I with its 256GB of RAM. Wait, I meant 256MB. Wait, no 256KB. Wait, sorry again. It had 256 Bytes of RAM. It could store basically just a single short paragraph in memory. That was it. You could take your node.js and shove it up your "
Severely underrated little computer. I loved my A600. Was a perfect computer for university.
i don't know what others think but i think these A600's were just GORGEOUS, belongs on a mantle piece
I agree.
I agree, best computer ever.
No,wow,NO
Keep the hands out of the shots.
My first computer was an Amiga 500. It served me as a gaming machine and it was awsome! Too bad I do not have it anymore. I hope someone takes care of it till this day!
Rewatching this it's interesting to see how much more professional your stuff is nowadays :)
Loved the look at the 600! Got some nice stuff under the case.
Back in the day A600 made very little sense. Today, if you don't care about AGA software, it's actually pretty nice Amiga with very good expansion possibilities.
This thing was never supposed to be a Amiga 600, early versions had A300 written on the board. The idea was a lower £199 cost Amiga 300 to replace the ageing C64, something you could expand (which is why it's so good for retro guys now) but Germany got in on the act and we ended up with this confused thing and we then got the A500+.
A600 more like a downgrade, that A500 keyboard lost, the Atari STe kind of showed it up as it kept it’s full keyboard, that would of actually cost to produce a new case and keyboard they should of kept the A500 design
Alot of people hated the a600 cut down keyboard ect but I loved it. Much smaller and compact. No rf unit to plug in the back either .1 meg standard which was a bonus
This video makes me sea sick
Sweet I need another Amiga 600 :D
I think the A 600 is ideal to get into Amiga retro computing, it doesn´t take too much space on the shelf and desk and has all the essential ingredients you need to game on it (the missing numeric pad being the only letdown) I have one with Amiga OS 3.2, a gotek drive and an usb stick full with games
Do you load the OS and then launch the games from there?
Yes the gotek drive replaces the normal disc drive, the rest is like a normal Amiga
The 600 came out about a year before the 1200. Wasn't cheap either. I bought the Lemmings Amiga 600 pack and it cost me £399 at the time(1991/92/93 or so). Was flipping annoyed about that as about 2 months later the price dropped £100.
I had an external 200mg hard drive that plugged into the pcmia slot. Bloody expensive at the time and I never did fill it up completely. The HDD cost more than the flipping Amiga.
I had one of these for Christmas back in 1992 when I was 15.
"My games room" :')
Admittedly a lot of that went over my head mate but enjoyed the overview anyway ;)
It hd a TKL layout... ahead of its time!! :oD
impressive! I have an A1200 running with a 4GB flash memory card and 8MB fast ram expansion. Turning it into an A1208. I'm getting 2.96MFLOPS. I see you're getting 3.47MFLOPS with the 68020 clocked at 18MHz.. so you're around 2.5 times quicker than a standard A1200.. nice one! lovely A600
I remember hearing about the A600 before the A1200 had leaked, and despite it having proper support for PAL, I didn't consider the A600 worthy of replacing my A1000 (which had a total of 1.5MB installed). I remember how confused everyone was about the A600 and NOBODY wanted it, even though I loved how small it was. I immediately pre-ordered the A1200 as soon as it was announced, and literally got the very first machine in my area. I also soon dropped in 4MB fast RAM and an FPU, which wasn't possible on the A600.
I wouldn't mind having an A600 as a collector's item, as it is brilliantly compact, but the A1200 is still the king of Amigas and my favorite computer of all time. Mine is still pure white and minty fresh, and I use it all the time. 8)
I may pick up an non-working one just to put on a shelf at some point. But I'll defo be getting a boxed A1200 working for my collection :D
Nice. Funny how the A600 went from unloved to what it is now.
3 viewers will have nothing to do with those 'new fangled computers'.
+MarkTheMorose haha thanks! and yeah aht A600 is now the king of amigas thanks to the new Vampire 2 board. Having said that things are always changing , im sure we will see FPGA boards coming out for other Amigas including the A1200
Always loved the feel of the keyboard an so on except the cables should've been from one side of the power box only, always difficult on a desk. Years ago my A600 gave up because of the hdd. I didn't know that a cf/hdd adapter had gone on (year?) sale. Did you need to install the system to the flashcf while inserted or ext? Or set as the system disk with some utility (name?) first, and then copy system files onto it externaly before plugging in as primary drive?
I don't understand computers anymore.
funny how the two aspects that were largely despised at the time (pcmcia & ide interfaces) have made the A600 more enticing for retro-computing now :)
Fri 11/11/11 11:11 LOL!!! If that ain't a message from a higher power, then I don't know what ain't!!!
♥️ I love the A600 ♥️
That's so unfortunate I don't have my first computer with the first monitor any more. It was Cyrix equivalent of Pentium processor and 14 inch ultra curved monitor and that was so awesome! :')
Cyrix 586 ;) The CPU that Quake killed (so goes the myth)
The A600 was a failure because it was too expensive. It was designed to be a budget machine (as specified by Commodore UK) but Commodore Germany got hold of it and started changing things until it cost as much as an Amiga 500+ and ended up being marketed as a succesor just which reached market about 6 months before the Amiga 1200 came out. It just didn't make sense in the market.
Exactly. I can see why it was loved by people who had one as their first Amiga, but for A500 owners, this was NOT an "upgrade" at all, and so it's market was limited to new-comers of the time. And then it was swiftly and TOTALLY surpassed by the A1200, which was around the same price but was 32 Bit. I'd argue the A1200 would have done better if the A600 never made it to market. If you'd just purchased the A600 and then the A1200 came out, you'd be pissed as hell.
It’s not like Commodore to completely screw pricing *cough*264 series.
The real reason the A600 cost so much was the decision to use surface-mount technology, which at the time was very expensive. The engineers disagreed on whether SMD would be cheaper or not, and management sided with the guys who insisted it would be cheaper, even though it was blatantly obvious from the suppliers that was not the case. I think the guys from Germany were the ones responsible for the PCMCIA slot, which indeed was quite costly due to all the bus arbitration chips, but it wasn't the biggest cost.
Ultimately, while the CDTV gets a lot of the blame, the A600 is what really sunk Commodore. They manufactured more than a million A600's anticipating huge demand, and didn't order enough A1200 parts from Hewlett Packard. The company took a huge write-off on the massive inventory of 600's nobody wanted, while the 1200 was out of stock throughout the 1992 Christmas season. They lost a TON of money in 1993, selling A600's at a loss and sinking extra manufacturing costs into expediting A1200 production and shipping. There was no way to recover from that. What a mess.
100bucks is cheap? Boy we live on different worlds
$100 for a PC that kicked IBMs and Apples butt at the time is a decent price
i love my a600
Loved it. A full game on a 1.3mb floppy disk. Amazing. Earthworm Jim and Zool were great.
People tend to forget, that commodore intended the pcmcia port, to be a games cartridge port. They wanted games devellopers to release games that was able to run from a pcmcia based read only storage. That is what they talked about during launch. Then we have the placement of the joystick porte, that clearly indicates ease of use, in regards to plugging in. And finally we have the size of the machine, that clearly indicates non-office use. We have compatibility with most old a500 software and games.
I think people have missed the point of the 600 all these years. It is supposed to be a games console for what games that were already released, and games that were what we now know as casual gaming. Finally, it was geared towards kids and teenagers, and so they included a keyboard as well, just to be on the front with the failures of CDTV and C64-GS. After all. The C64-GS was the brainchild of mehdi ali, and I bet he did not want to repeat the failure of the C64-GS. And the keyboard was included because the C64-GS turned out to play games that needed a keyboard as well.
I think these are the reason for why the 600 was build the way it was.
persistent saliva spitting?
The Amiga 600 was ahead of it's time in terms of design and compactness, yeah some people didn't receive it well but it's stood the test of time better than the ugly lardy A500, couple it with a Vampire V2, no need for any other Amiga's.
Yes, it was great that it was so small. Handy for university.
Nice review. Why does the system clock go from 16/11/14 to 11/11/11 11:11?
I think you highlighted at the end why a full keyboard is important for Amiga games. The Amiga 600 was just a bad idea.
Hai un bel AMIGA,buona configurazione
Loved it. A full game on a 1.3mb floppy disk. Amazing.
Not 1.3mb, its an 880k floppy disk