@Mark Vegan I don't really know how many games I have on the whdload. It came with the 600. It's partly why I bought it . They are in alphabetised folders,which works quite well. Although the whdload installation seems to be a bit off. I was under the impression my 600 had been recapped, but it came with a bag of capacitors, so another reason I bought it. I got that wrong 😂. The A600 is a great machine, but alot of games need the keyboard layout of a 500 or 1200. I hope to get a 500 one day as that is what I had in the day.
Got one second hand back in 1997, it still works fine and I've got tons of games. The 600 was manufactured just down the road from me at a plant in Irvine, Scotland. I originally had a 500 back in the very early 90's then upgraded to a 1200. Happy gaming days.
That was awesome, really took me back. I was quite young in 1992 so I didn't understand much of the technical stuff at the time but I was always trying to figure out a way to install games to the a600 hdd and navigate the operating system. The Kickstart set of disks in the cupboard were always a strange unknown.
This video revived every emotion I had towards Amigas back in early 90s. I sold my PS3 simply because it's boring and went with a clean 600HD bought ACA 620, A604n mem, 3.1 / 1.3 switchable kickstart and CF mod. Even though 1200 these days are similarly priced I simply always loved 600's size hence I chose to go with it over 1200. Still waiting for everything to arrive but I'm hyped just like I was when I got my A500 back on the day :)
Nice review, the Amiga 600 was my first Amiga. I had it standard and upgraded with an extra 1mb of RAM and a 60mb Hard Disk. Its a shame the hard disk has died, in its old age and my brother is still in possession of this machine. So I'm using this video to convince him to get the flash card adaptor and a 4mb PCMCIA ram expansion for it :)
My first A600 was a 'Manager's Special' from Dixons in the late 90's; it was £40 for the A600 and PSU, I don't think it even had the mouse or RF lead. It was a display model, just sitting in a glass case looking lonely. I'd already got a second hand A1200, and owned an A4000, but the A600 looked so small and cute I couldn't resist, so asked them what they wanted for it. :)
It's possible that there is some dust or build-up either on the contacts under the key switches, or the keyboard membrane may have been damaged over time. You will have to pull it apart to check. It's also possible that the edge of the keyboard ribbon that plugs into the machine has been worn, if that's the case you may be able to trim a tiny bit off so it has a fresh edge.
Can be used for HD as well yes, you can put CF Card adapters in there or CD-ROMs too. It has IDE inside though which is better for day-to-day hard disk, PCMCIA good for moving files between systems.
What a great review!! I still have my 500 and 2000, as well as a C64C (that I just picked up a 1564 SD drive for:)). I've been wanting to get my 500 going again so I can play all the old games, but after watching this picking up a 600 may be a better idea.
It can be plugged in to a modern LCD easily yeah, either via composite or better, RGB to Scart. It is a 4:3 display though, so yeah it would be stretched at 16:9, but a lot of TVs allow you to go back to 4:3 mode with side letter-boxing.
Nice review man, brings back a lot of memories. I couldnt imagine sticking in a solid state 4gb flash card into the ide connector. I had the a600 and added a 60mb drive. Your video makes me want to go out and buy another one :). You also forgot to mention that the A600 had the built in RF modulator, which the a500 didnt.
@techguruuk thanks for info. yes, i remember when the spectrum came out, there was a program on tv where they dialed up the web. very basic, but it worked in text
£30 - £40 for an Amiga 600 back in 2011, just goes to show how much prices have jumped in the last couple of years since the retro scene has taken off again. Still got my A600, great video 👍🏻
I wish I could be of more help. I had two DD disk drives, with the external drive designated as a FAT12 disk drive. DMS I copied to RAM: so it was relatively fast to unpack them. If you have a hard drive in your Amiga, you can use that. The A500 I had was Kickstart 1.2 and the 512kb Slowmem expansion. The A500 chipset could only address 512kb of memory, where Chipmem comes from, Slowmem was the expansion scheme, only for the CPU.
Excellent video, I have my A600 sitting next to my PC, bought it in April 1994 for £165. I still use it when my wife is on the PC. Upgraded the RAM to 2Mb. I did not know that you could buy these PCMCIA cards so cheap. Some of my games on floppy disc have stopped working, I am starting to back them up now, they say floppy discs will eventually wear out so I need to do something. I have an Amiga M1438S monitor, I prefer this to RGB to Scart connection to the TV.
excellent stuff! i still have a working original A600 stored away in a sealed plastic crate, which i originally bought just to get into music sequencing etc.
@turnermedman1231 You can go on the internet with an Amiga 500 yes, I know many people used to dial up BBS and I have even seen upgraded ones on the web too :)
Nice machine! I love how compact it is. I had a A500 and A1200 in past though AMIGA had a fairly small presence in Canada I would have loved to have this back in the day also, I would still want one lol! Amiga 1200/600/500 most are in UK and even if I find reasonable price the shipping is crazy high PLUS I get screwed on border taxes too. My biggest regret of my collection to this day is getting rid of my AMIGA stuff!
It all depends. I live in the States and own a European A1200, and it varies depending on the monitor driver and/or screen mode used. PAL modes use 50Hz, NTSC modes use 60. But over composite, my 1200 would still require a display capable of PAL signals for color composite.
Is there a way around the WHDload problem of using the "prt" key on the keypad to quit quite a lot of the games, without having to do it manually in the tool types for each game? Some sort of mass tool type search and replace application perhaps?
But there are ram expansions for the PCMCIA slot. The only problem is iirc that the ram may be shown as fastram but is in fact only on a 16bit bus and thus slower than chipram.
Quite a lot really, the A1200 has more advanced graphics, an upgraded chip-set, a newer version of the operating system and is more expandable generally. I'd go with the 1200 over the 600.
But JUST the card ? Not only the whole adapter with CF card inside ? If so that would be brilliant ! Ive worried about the physical wear and tear on my PCMCIA slot
At the time of its release, the A600 rang an alarm bell for me that Commodore weren't the savvy experts I had assumed them to be until that time- I loved my Amiga 500+ and knew loads of people had them, but I was also aware that it wasn't a brand new machine and was showing its age a bit, and it was clear that the A600 was not a revolution, just a modest improvement on the A500 and 500+. But even at the time I could appreciate its neat compact appearance, handily small so that it could take up very little desk space, comparable even to one of the 16 bit consoles. A couple of my mates bought them, and though I considered it a bit of a mistake I nonetheless rather liked the style of the machine. It's build quality and long term future potential for expansion (as described in this video) are big pluses in its favour as a retro machine.
I haven't a clue how to do it on a memory card and the A600. For the A500, I used to pack the .adf file (it's not a ROM, btw, but a disk image) with DMS (DiskSMasher) on the WinUAE emulator, and copy the packed file to a 720kb formatted floppy. Using CrossDos or something (I forget the name of the best software that read DOS disks, mounted them as native) I then unpacked the DMS files to a native Amiga 880kb disk.
I see. But all this on an off the shelf machine or a heavily upgraded one ? (Thus very expensive). To me an Amiga with a Blizzard accelerator is not an Amiga anymore : what's left is the chipsets, the core of the architecture is by engineers from Blizzard, so there's no reason to emphasise the fantastic power of the Amiga. At least with Acorn, CPU upgrades are by the same company engineers as they created the chips. It's why I admire these Acorn people.
@TableWolfMusic Well I would think that upgrading the external floppy drive port to accept CD drives would be great, the price of the machine would be same likely
Started on a stock A500+, added a 1 meg RAM expansion after, later on a stock A1200, added a few megs RAM in the trapdoor and a hard disk later, that was about it. Got a CD-ROM drive after a few years too, never had an accelerator back in the day.
Nice review. Love your videos. I also have Amiga 500 and 600. I am currently upgrading them with accelerators, floppy emulators and stuff. Much of my renewed interest came from watching your videos! I have to admit that I like my Amiga 500 more than my 600. I have a ACA 500 and waiting for the ACA 1233 (40MHz with 128MB RAM that plugs into the ACA 500). Also, I have the rev.6A Amiga 500. This makes the ACA 500 able to turn the 512KB trapdoor mem into chip RAM. So I get 1MB chip RAM. So all in all, after the ACA 500 came the Amiga 500 can be upgraded to a stronger accelerator VS Amiga 600. However, the Amiga 600 can be upgraded to 2MB Chip mem. There are only a few OCS/ECS WHDloader games that require more than 1MB though. Oh, and the ACA 500 has two flashcard slots. One for transfering files from PC. Amiga 500 is also easier to upgrade with Indivision ECS Scandoubler VS Amiga 600. Amiga 600 requires you to have the 2MB trapdoor expansion in order to use the ECS internal scandoubler. When all this is said, the Amiga 600 is still great since you can do all these upgrades inside the machine itself making it very small compared to the Amiga 500.
Thanks for this. I inherited an A600 along with my A1200. I had plans for upgrading my A1200. Your suggestion of a CF card and WHD load using it as a gaming Amiga is a really nice idea. It's the right width to fit in a TV stand, or at least mine. The 47cm A1200 is just too wide.
does this version still have the software speech synth? I've heard that from a certain point they didn't include it into the amiga operating system anymore. Damn, this 600 is very tempting. I'm still thinking about either getting a A1200 or A600 as an addition to my C64 :) A school friend of mine once gave me a box full of floppies and there were also a lot of Amiga games which till today i could never try out so far.
WHDLoad does need more RAM than the stock 1meg yeah, as it loads soft-kicked versions of the kickstart ROM into RAM to enable you to play older (A500 games etc.). Ideally it works best with around 4 megs, you could probably get away with 2 megs if you disable features like pre-loading though. With 1meg, doubt you'd have much joy. Unfortunately the PCMCIA to CF Adaptor just works as a hard disk afaik, not RAM. You can buy PCMCIA RAM but it's hard to find and pricey per meg.
(PART TWO) 3) how should I format the external CF to be read by amiga's workbench ? 4) there is a folder for each game ... how like the games must be copied into them? 5) Keep in mind that I have the ROM of amiga's games... in your opinion how should I proceed? thank you so far if you will answer me!
'm really impressed!! :O I have an Amiga 600 with a internal 3gb HD and I want to create folders inside with the best games...like you! tell me please how are put games into folders? I mean ... if i have the floppy drive of the game ... i just copy it in his folder? or is there some other procedure, utility or Quelch? because I remember that some games had a "boot" with intro and trainer ... copying all files on disk will be lost it....right? you tell me please! thanks if you want to answer :)
Wow, this brought back allot of memories of my child hood in England. I am seriously pondering buying another if i can find one for sale here in the States. Ill have to do some research and see what helper sites there is out there for the good old Amiga machines :)
5 years after the A500 was released, minimal improvements. Lets not get misty eyed over this, it was far too little, far too late, and reflected on both the massive mis-management of Commodore and the genius that was Jay Miner. Commodore had the future of computing in its palm and blew it.
You need the software WHDload that techguruuk mentioned. While some Amiga games allowed installation to hard drive, it was the minority. WHDload allows you to copy to hard drive, and gets around some incompatibility problems, like old games not working with newer Kickstart versions. You need Fast RAM, like the PCMCIA card shown, to run most games through WHDload.
(PART ONE) very, very interesting!!! I make my more congratulations!!! I'm Italian and I do not understand English very well sorry! :-( I am very interested for how you put the games in the external CF. I ask for this: 1) What version of workbench you have? 2) I want to read the additional drivers for read outside cf?
The amazing thing is....how many Amiga's are still working. The more i research the current community, the more confidence I have that many are still running. I have to ask myself, how many PC's have I thrown out between 1989 and now? Even this week, I pulled out two old P4 boxes, and I had 4 HHD's to play with. 3 out of the 4 drives are cactus, and one of the power supplys is temperamental, and I'm going to have to butcher parts between the two to resurrect a semi-good machine to use as....a dedicated Amiga emulator.
But the Blizzard accelerator only upgraded the 68000 CPU to a higher Motorola model, didn't change anything else, the custom chips etc. were all the same, just like in an A1200 with an 020 or a 3000 with 030, a 4000 with 040, Amigas came with all these CPUs anyway.
Hi techguruk , Nice video , im a big Amiga fan aswell , i have a 4000 and a micro A1 os4.1 machine , i must get a RGB to SCART like yours to use on the 4000 seems to give a fantastic picture on your plasma :)
Just wondering if you ever used deluxe paint 3 on this amiga ever always liked this software may have been a bit hard to figure out at the best of time but it was purely a fantastic art program came with some clever tools a very early art program but I still remember it being a go to program back then I am sure you have it and it is probably still out there being used? The Gimp of its day and other art and photoshop came from this Amiga Art program not sure if there were other available in the early days but I also owned a ZX Spectrum it had Art Studio very similar? You never used any Speecys?
While a lot of Amigas were sold for the games, it was certainly a lot more capable than that. The OS was one of the first pre-emptive multitasking OSes for home users, it had a plethora of fantastic programs for graphics, 3d rendering, music production, it was a creative powerhouse in its day.
Awesome video. You do the Amigas justice my friend! haha And if you ever fancy having an all-night-long retro Amiga gaming session, just let me know! lol
I was thinking of the A1200...the 68020 can address memory in 32bit mode FAST ram...so when you used a PCMCIA(16bit) it was like SLOW memory...as opposed to using a 4MB expansion in the trap door (32bit)....but the A600 (68000) still addresses in 16bit mode so memory added to the trapdoor is about the same speed as PCMCIA SRAM cards...probably can't really tell that much diff on that system anyway but at least you can use whdload...for more things with an SRAM card.
Nice review! I just got one in nice enough condition to add to my permanent collection. I'm going to add an accelerator, flickerfixer, clock, and perhaps USB to make this a powerful portable Amiga for shows. One thing I wish you'd brought up: The 600, 1200 and 4000 all tend to suffer from capacitor leakage. Many 600s might have problems reading floppies or with video or audio output because foo this. When shopping for a 600, it's best to get one that has been recapped or plan to open it up and do that yourself.
Hello! Thanks for the overview. It's always cool to see a fellow Miggy enthusiast. Just a quick question if I may. When you use the PCMCIA adapter with the SD card does it see it as just a disk or can it be configured to be used as fast ram? Is this ok for WHDLOAD or does it require 2mb chip? I have a stock A600 I want to give to a friend... I just need the cheapest ram upgrade option for running disk images. Thanks dude! Aaron.
Hehe, I had a cool little program that read out different greetings depending on the time of day. Its a shame it didn't work on the A1200 properly due to its lack of a real time clock.
Not sure I'd class spreadsheets as "creative software", it wasn't a business machine, but for graphics, video production, music, animation etc. it was unrivalled for many years. The Acorn machines were great educational systems, but I can't think of anything on RiscOS that matches the likes of Lightwave, Deluxe Paint etc. The OS being on disk was a mixed blessing, made it easier to update, but yeah it was a lot easier to use with a hard disk, it was very lightweight though, not greedy at all.
One question: Can I swap CF cards in the PCMCIA slot without pulling the entire adapter out ? Ive recently gotten worried about wearing out my (A1200) PCMCIA slot ! I mean, can I just take out the CF card and leave the adapter while putting another card into the adapter ? And can this safely be done "hot" ? I know I can "hotplug" and unplug the adapter with card (atleast I have been doing that).. But it would be easier to just pull the CF card from the adapter. Ofcourse not hotplug ramcard.
I have an A600 with a CF 4GB IDE and ACA020. Never used PCMCIA though except EasyNet. I bought a CF Compact Flash PCMCIA Card Reader Adapter Converter but it's not on my hands right now. Can I set this type of converter as RAM or HD? As for CD-Rom I din't knew that I can connect it there. I have an A1200T with SCSI and I didn't ever tryied something else except some IDE HD-CD to my other Amigas. Thanks.
1mb internal on the motherboard and 1 meg in the trapdoor = 2 megs. Yeah they are about £30-40 now on ebay iirc, still they were around £400 back in the day lol
I had an Amiga A500+ in around 1991 with the best add on card, the Action Replay mkIII (happy days). Anyway, after watching this video I had a look on ebay and I got a A600 including 1mb trapdoor expansion, 2 joysticks, mouse and PSU for £56.50. 4GB Compact flash card and interface £37.99 (for the internal HD). New kickstart rom chip £7.99. Total spent £102.48 (including postage). Fired it up today and all working fine, played Turrican 2 and Alien Breed SE.
You can't just link an A600 up to a PC monitor, it outputs the wrong scan-rate, you'd need a scan doubler to do that. You need to plug it into a TV via SCART or S-Video for best quality, or composite if not.
I forgot the 68000 is only 16bit on the bus itself. But it would make a difference if you have an 020 card or better but no ram on the board. But in the this case it would be cheaper to get an internal ram expansion anyway.
Great Amiga videos, btw. :D I'm not sure whether the electronics were good enough at that time, but I think Commodore missed out on integrating the PSU here... the A600 was still stuck with that bulky old external brick. :D
I got one but immediately returned it for an A500. Everbody back then had A500 and the absence of numerical pad was a bit of disappointment. I think it was also incompatible with some software
Some games have native HD installers so you don't need WHDload.. not that many though. A few it works if you just copy the files to a drawer on the HD.. though not many of those either.
Although I have several Amiga machines I never owned an A600 until now! I've bought the PCMCIA and Compact Flash for transfers. Is it tricky to get drivers for this to work? I have ideas to fully restore this machine and add some extras :)
Bought an A600 yesterday off ebay, fully recapped and with whdload installed. Plus other extras. Can't wait 👍🏻
@Mark Vegan go for amiga passion, wish I had. Mines OK, got it of ebay. But wish I had waited.
Whd load is great, that's what I have. But i do like idea of the gotex. Amiga passion going to recap my eventually.
Go for the A1200, great machine. Again wish I had.
@Mark Vegan good for you, the 1200 was the one we always wanted in the day, now is the time👍🏻
@Mark Vegan I don't really know how many games I have on the whdload. It came with the 600. It's partly why I bought it . They are in alphabetised folders,which works quite well. Although the whdload installation seems to be a bit off. I was under the impression my 600 had been recapped, but it came with a bag of capacitors, so another reason I bought it. I got that wrong 😂. The A600 is a great machine, but alot of games need the keyboard layout of a 500 or 1200. I hope to get a 500 one day as that is what I had in the day.
Got one second hand back in 1997, it still works fine and I've got tons of games. The 600 was manufactured just down the road from me at a plant in Irvine, Scotland. I originally had a 500 back in the very early 90's then upgraded to a 1200. Happy gaming days.
Thanks for the upload!!! This was my frist Amiga. Brings back some memories. Excellent review and tips about connecting flashcards. thanks
Amiga 600 is the best looking of the lot. I love it. I'm selling my accelerated A1200 8mb, but keeping my 600. Love it.
dahDougieBoy the Amiga A600 is great, I got mine in April 1994 and still use it for coding in Easy AMOS
my 500 is sexier
That was awesome, really took me back.
I was quite young in 1992 so I didn't understand much of the technical stuff at the time but I was always trying to figure out a way to install games to the a600 hdd and navigate the operating system. The Kickstart set of disks in the cupboard were always a strange unknown.
I Still have my Commodore 64, Amiga 500 and 600. Cool machines.
This video revived every emotion I had towards Amigas back in early 90s.
I sold my PS3 simply because it's boring and went with a clean 600HD bought ACA 620, A604n mem, 3.1 / 1.3 switchable kickstart and CF mod. Even though 1200 these days are similarly priced I simply always loved 600's size hence I chose to go with it over 1200. Still waiting for everything to arrive but I'm hyped just like I was when I got my A500 back on the day :)
My first Amiga.... Damn, I miss it!
Nice review, the Amiga 600 was my first Amiga. I had it standard and upgraded with an extra 1mb of RAM and a 60mb Hard Disk. Its a shame the hard disk has died, in its old age and my brother is still in possession of this machine. So I'm using this video to convince him to get the flash card adaptor and a 4mb PCMCIA ram expansion for it :)
My first A600 was a 'Manager's Special' from Dixons in the late 90's; it was £40 for the A600 and PSU, I don't think it even had the mouse or RF lead. It was a display model, just sitting in a glass case looking lonely. I'd already got a second hand A1200, and owned an A4000, but the A600 looked so small and cute I couldn't resist, so asked them what they wanted for it. :)
It's possible that there is some dust or build-up either on the contacts under the key switches, or the keyboard membrane may have been damaged over time. You will have to pull it apart to check. It's also possible that the edge of the keyboard ribbon that plugs into the machine has been worn, if that's the case you may be able to trim a tiny bit off so it has a fresh edge.
Can be used for HD as well yes, you can put CF Card adapters in there or CD-ROMs too. It has IDE inside though which is better for day-to-day hard disk, PCMCIA good for moving files between systems.
What a great review!! I still have my 500 and 2000, as well as a C64C (that I just picked up a 1564 SD drive for:)). I've been wanting to get my 500 going again so I can play all the old games, but after watching this picking up a 600 may be a better idea.
@Bloodgod40 The board is a recent product, it was only manufactured in 2010 :) Individual Computers are a company making new Amiga expansions.
It can be plugged in to a modern LCD easily yeah, either via composite or better, RGB to Scart. It is a 4:3 display though, so yeah it would be stretched at 16:9, but a lot of TVs allow you to go back to 4:3 mode with side letter-boxing.
Nice review man, brings back a lot of memories. I couldnt imagine sticking in a solid state 4gb flash card into the ide connector. I had the a600 and added a 60mb drive. Your video makes me want to go out and buy another one :). You also forgot to mention that the A600 had the built in RF modulator, which the a500 didnt.
@techguruuk thanks for info. yes, i remember when the spectrum came out, there was a program on tv where they dialed up the web. very basic, but it worked in text
My A600 computer some of the keys don't work not sure what's wrong any help would be great thanks
sash N try turning it upside down to get all the dirt out, may help.
£30 - £40 for an Amiga 600 back in 2011, just goes to show how much prices have jumped in the last couple of years since the retro scene has taken off again. Still got my A600, great video 👍🏻
They did make Amigas with factory fitted 030, 040 and even 060 processors too, the A3000, 4000 and 4000T series.
I wish I could be of more help. I had two DD disk drives, with the external drive designated as a FAT12 disk drive. DMS I copied to RAM: so it was relatively fast to unpack them. If you have a hard drive in your Amiga, you can use that. The A500 I had was Kickstart 1.2 and the 512kb Slowmem expansion. The A500 chipset could only address 512kb of memory, where Chipmem comes from, Slowmem was the expansion scheme, only for the CPU.
@MN12BIRD Very few PCMCIA cards worked with the 600 due to lack of drivers and various other problems
It was my computer number 2 (first was C=64II), but I think that it was most beautiful computer ever.
studionti it is, had mine since April 1994.
Excellent video, I have my A600 sitting next to my PC, bought it in April 1994 for £165. I still use it when my wife is on the PC. Upgraded the RAM to 2Mb. I did not know that you could buy these PCMCIA cards so cheap. Some of my games on floppy disc have stopped working, I am starting to back them up now, they say floppy discs will eventually wear out so I need to do something. I have an Amiga M1438S monitor, I prefer this to RGB to Scart connection to the TV.
excellent stuff! i still have a working original A600 stored away in a sealed plastic crate, which i originally bought just to get into music sequencing etc.
Still got one of these hooked up under my TV, I love it!
Excellent review. A pleasure to watch.
This is so cute! I knew about the 500, 2000, and 1200, but had forgotten how tiny the 600 is! Makes me want one.
@turnermedman1231 You can go on the internet with an Amiga 500 yes, I know many people used to dial up BBS and I have even seen upgraded ones on the web too :)
Nice machine! I love how compact it is. I had a A500 and A1200 in past though AMIGA had a fairly small presence in Canada I would have loved to have this back in the day also, I would still want one lol! Amiga 1200/600/500 most are in UK and even if I find reasonable price the shipping is crazy high PLUS I get screwed on border taxes too. My biggest regret of my collection to this day is getting rid of my AMIGA stuff!
Great video Dan
It all depends. I live in the States and own a European A1200, and it varies depending on the monitor driver and/or screen mode used. PAL modes use 50Hz, NTSC modes use 60.
But over composite, my 1200 would still require a display capable of PAL signals for color composite.
Is there a way around the WHDload problem of using the "prt" key on the keypad to quit quite a lot of the games, without having to do it manually in the tool types for each game?
Some sort of mass tool type search and replace application perhaps?
I won an A1200 from one of the Amiga Magazines back in the day.
But there are ram expansions for the PCMCIA slot.
The only problem is iirc that the ram may be shown as fastram but is in fact only on a 16bit bus and thus slower than chipram.
Quite a lot really, the A1200 has more advanced graphics, an upgraded chip-set, a newer version of the operating system and is more expandable generally. I'd go with the 1200 over the 600.
But JUST the card ? Not only the whole adapter with CF card inside ?
If so that would be brilliant ! Ive worried about the physical wear and tear on my PCMCIA slot
At the time of its release, the A600 rang an alarm bell for me that Commodore weren't the savvy experts I had assumed them to be until that time- I loved my Amiga 500+ and knew loads of people had them, but I was also aware that it wasn't a brand new machine and was showing its age a bit, and it was clear that the A600 was not a revolution, just a modest improvement on the A500 and 500+. But even at the time I could appreciate its neat compact appearance, handily small so that it could take up very little desk space, comparable even to one of the 16 bit consoles. A couple of my mates bought them, and though I considered it a bit of a mistake I nonetheless rather liked the style of the machine. It's build quality and long term future potential for expansion (as described in this video) are big pluses in its favour as a retro machine.
I haven't a clue how to do it on a memory card and the A600. For the A500, I used to pack the .adf file (it's not a ROM, btw, but a disk image) with DMS (DiskSMasher) on the WinUAE emulator, and copy the packed file to a 720kb formatted floppy. Using CrossDos or something (I forget the name of the best software that read DOS disks, mounted them as native) I then unpacked the DMS files to a native Amiga 880kb disk.
I see. But all this on an off the shelf machine or a heavily upgraded one ? (Thus very expensive).
To me an Amiga with a Blizzard accelerator is not an Amiga anymore : what's left is the chipsets, the core of the architecture is by engineers from Blizzard, so there's no reason to emphasise the fantastic power of the Amiga.
At least with Acorn, CPU upgrades are by the same company engineers as they created the chips.
It's why I admire these Acorn people.
@TableWolfMusic Well I would think that upgrading the external floppy drive port to accept CD drives would be great, the price of the machine would be same likely
Started on a stock A500+, added a 1 meg RAM expansion after, later on a stock A1200, added a few megs RAM in the trapdoor and a hard disk later, that was about it. Got a CD-ROM drive after a few years too, never had an accelerator back in the day.
I believe it can be changed in the global WHDLoad settings yes!
Nice review. Love your videos. I also have Amiga 500 and 600. I am currently upgrading them with accelerators, floppy emulators and stuff. Much of my renewed interest came from watching your videos! I have to admit that I like my Amiga 500 more than my 600. I have a ACA 500 and waiting for the ACA 1233 (40MHz with 128MB RAM that plugs into the ACA 500). Also, I have the rev.6A Amiga 500. This makes the ACA 500 able to turn the 512KB trapdoor mem into chip RAM. So I get 1MB chip RAM. So all in all, after the ACA 500 came the Amiga 500 can be upgraded to a stronger accelerator VS Amiga 600. However, the Amiga 600 can be upgraded to 2MB Chip mem. There are only a few OCS/ECS WHDloader games that require more than 1MB though. Oh, and the ACA 500 has two flashcard slots. One for transfering files from PC. Amiga 500 is also easier to upgrade with Indivision ECS Scandoubler VS Amiga 600. Amiga 600 requires you to have the 2MB trapdoor expansion in order to use the ECS internal scandoubler. When all this is said, the Amiga 600 is still great since you can do all these upgrades inside the machine itself making it very small compared to the Amiga 500.
Nice video. There will always be a spot in my heart for the 600 although my main use amiga is a heavily expanded 1200. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this. I inherited an A600 along with my A1200. I had plans for upgrading my A1200. Your suggestion of a CF card and WHD load using it as a gaming Amiga is a really nice idea. It's the right width to fit in a TV stand, or at least mine. The 47cm A1200 is just too wide.
Wow. Awesome. I actually own a mint Amiga 600 HD. I think I will do some of these upgrades!
You don't no, the 40mb limit is a fallacy that seems to have spread on-line for years, no idea where it came from originally, but it's not true.
does this version still have the software speech synth? I've heard that from a certain point they didn't include it into the amiga operating system anymore. Damn, this 600 is very tempting. I'm still thinking about either getting a A1200 or A600 as an addition to my C64 :) A school friend of mine once gave me a box full of floppies and there were also a lot of Amiga games which till today i could never try out so far.
WHDLoad does need more RAM than the stock 1meg yeah, as it loads soft-kicked versions of the kickstart ROM into RAM to enable you to play older (A500 games etc.). Ideally it works best with around 4 megs, you could probably get away with 2 megs if you disable features like pre-loading though. With 1meg, doubt you'd have much joy. Unfortunately the PCMCIA to CF Adaptor just works as a hard disk afaik, not RAM. You can buy PCMCIA RAM but it's hard to find and pricey per meg.
(PART TWO)
3) how should I format the external CF to be read by amiga's workbench ?
4) there is a folder for each game ... how like the games must be copied into them?
5) Keep in mind that I have the ROM of amiga's games... in your opinion how should I proceed?
thank you so far if you will answer me!
Great video. I got Amiga 600 when they came out and loved it. Spent many a happy hour playing on it ;-)
'm really impressed!! :O
I have an Amiga 600 with a internal 3gb HD and I want to create folders inside with the best games...like you!
tell me please how are put games into folders?
I mean ...
if i have the floppy drive of the game ... i just copy it in his folder?
or is there some other procedure, utility or Quelch?
because I remember that some games had a "boot" with intro and trainer ...
copying all files on disk will be lost it....right?
you tell me please!
thanks if you want to answer :)
Wow, this brought back allot of memories of my child hood in England. I am seriously pondering buying another if i can find one for sale here in the States. Ill have to do some research and see what helper sites there is out there for the good old Amiga machines :)
Funnily enough that will be my next video. I did record one but lost all the footage, grr. I'll re-do it soon though.
5 years after the A500 was released, minimal improvements. Lets not get misty eyed over this, it was far too little, far too late, and reflected on both the massive mis-management of Commodore and the genius that was Jay Miner. Commodore had the future of computing in its palm and blew it.
You need the software WHDload that techguruuk mentioned. While some Amiga games allowed installation to hard drive, it was the minority. WHDload allows you to copy to hard drive, and gets around some incompatibility problems, like old games not working with newer Kickstart versions. You need Fast RAM, like the PCMCIA card shown, to run most games through WHDload.
(PART ONE)
very, very interesting!!!
I make my more congratulations!!!
I'm Italian and I do not understand English very well sorry! :-(
I am very interested for how you put the games in the external CF.
I ask for this:
1) What version of workbench you have?
2) I want to read the additional drivers for read outside cf?
The amazing thing is....how many Amiga's are still working. The more i research the current community, the more confidence I have that many are still running. I have to ask myself, how many PC's have I thrown out between 1989 and now? Even this week, I pulled out two old P4 boxes, and I had 4 HHD's to play with. 3 out of the 4 drives are cactus, and one of the power supplys is temperamental, and I'm going to have to butcher parts between the two to resurrect a semi-good machine to use as....a dedicated Amiga emulator.
I think that utility was built into Workbench, my A1200 has a copy of it on Workbench 3.1
But the Blizzard accelerator only upgraded the 68000 CPU to a higher Motorola model, didn't change anything else, the custom chips etc. were all the same, just like in an A1200 with an 020 or a 3000 with 030, a 4000 with 040, Amigas came with all these CPUs anyway.
as a newbie to A600, I can't seem to find those 4 mb fast ram cards anywhere. Where to get them ?
Hi techguruk , Nice video , im a big Amiga fan aswell , i have a 4000 and a micro A1 os4.1 machine , i must get a RGB to SCART like yours to use on the 4000 seems to give a fantastic picture on your plasma :)
You can, just pop the card out and put another one in and it will mount on the Workbench like any disk :)
Just wondering if you ever used deluxe paint 3 on this amiga ever always liked this software may have been a bit hard to figure out at the best of time but it was purely a fantastic art program came with some clever tools a very early art program but I still remember it being a go to program back then I am sure you have it and it is probably still out there being used? The Gimp of its day and other art and photoshop came from this Amiga Art program not sure if there were other available in the early days but I also owned a ZX Spectrum it had Art Studio very similar? You never used any Speecys?
While a lot of Amigas were sold for the games, it was certainly a lot more capable than that. The OS was one of the first pre-emptive multitasking OSes for home users, it had a plethora of fantastic programs for graphics, 3d rendering, music production, it was a creative powerhouse in its day.
Does the amiga 600 work with games like Shadow of the beast? I am looking to buy one.
Awesome video. You do the Amigas justice my friend! haha And if you ever fancy having an all-night-long retro Amiga gaming session, just let me know! lol
I was thinking of the A1200...the 68020 can address memory in 32bit mode FAST ram...so when you used a PCMCIA(16bit) it was like SLOW memory...as opposed to using a 4MB expansion in the trap door (32bit)....but the A600 (68000) still addresses in 16bit mode so memory added to the trapdoor is about the same speed as PCMCIA SRAM cards...probably can't really tell that much diff on that system anyway but at least you can use whdload...for more things with an SRAM card.
Nice review!
I just got one in nice enough condition to add to my permanent collection. I'm going to add an accelerator, flickerfixer, clock, and perhaps USB to make this a powerful portable Amiga for shows.
One thing I wish you'd brought up: The 600, 1200 and 4000 all tend to suffer from capacitor leakage. Many 600s might have problems reading floppies or with video or audio output because foo this. When shopping for a 600, it's best to get one that has been recapped or plan to open it up and do that yourself.
I've got a question... what's the technical differences between the A600 and teh A1200?
If I would get one of these, what do you advice me to get?
Didn't the 600 have compatibility issues with some games? As well as the 500+.
Hello! Thanks for the overview. It's always cool to see a fellow Miggy enthusiast. Just a quick question if I may. When you use the PCMCIA adapter with the SD card does it see it as just a disk or can it be configured to be used as fast ram? Is this ok for WHDLOAD or does it require 2mb chip? I have a stock A600 I want to give to a friend... I just need the cheapest ram upgrade option for running disk images. Thanks dude! Aaron.
Your iPhone on the top left on the screen. How many times more powerful is it? :)
@3:18 3.25" floppies? Think you mean 3.5".
I really, really wanted an Amiga back in the day. They had the best games.
3.5 inch drive, not 3.25. You might have got it confused with the 5.25 inch floppies from earlier. Sorry, being pedantic.
Hehe, I had a cool little program that read out different greetings depending on the time of day. Its a shame it didn't work on the A1200 properly due to its lack of a real time clock.
Not sure I'd class spreadsheets as "creative software", it wasn't a business machine, but for graphics, video production, music, animation etc. it was unrivalled for many years. The Acorn machines were great educational systems, but I can't think of anything on RiscOS that matches the likes of Lightwave, Deluxe Paint etc. The OS being on disk was a mixed blessing, made it easier to update, but yeah it was a lot easier to use with a hard disk, it was very lightweight though, not greedy at all.
One question: Can I swap CF cards in the PCMCIA slot without pulling the entire adapter out ? Ive recently gotten worried about wearing out my (A1200) PCMCIA slot !
I mean, can I just take out the CF card and leave the adapter while putting another card into the adapter ? And can this safely be done "hot" ?
I know I can "hotplug" and unplug the adapter with card (atleast I have been doing that).. But it would be easier to just pull the CF card from the adapter.
Ofcourse not hotplug ramcard.
The resion for compact flash working as an IDE drive is compact flash IS IDE just smaller and slightly different pinouts
i'm trying to find a cable to link my A600 to my monitor - VGA or DVI - do you know where to get one?
@vabis1200 just HDToolbox
I have an A600 with a CF 4GB IDE and ACA020. Never used PCMCIA though except EasyNet. I bought a CF Compact Flash PCMCIA Card Reader Adapter Converter but it's not on my hands right now. Can I set this type of converter as RAM or HD? As for CD-Rom I din't knew that I can connect it there. I have an A1200T with SCSI and I didn't ever tryied something else except some IDE HD-CD to my other Amigas. Thanks.
Can you give me PLEASE a tutorial for your WHD load ? I have tons of games, but they didn't work.
the game on Hd are in ADF format? (sorry im french).....Juste copy the game rom ADF from a PC to a flash disk and plug in to the a600?
The surface mount reduced the failure rate from 8.25% of the A500 to 0.78 on the A600
Another thing, can the pcmcia used for HD too? or it's only RAM?
Ebay seems popular for all sorts of stuff. There was a company in Germany selling Amiga supplies not too many years ago, but I forget its name.
1mb internal on the motherboard and 1 meg in the trapdoor = 2 megs. Yeah they are about £30-40 now on ebay iirc, still they were around £400 back in the day lol
I had an Amiga A500+ in around 1991 with the best add on card, the Action Replay mkIII (happy days). Anyway, after watching this video I had a look on ebay and I got a A600 including 1mb trapdoor expansion, 2 joysticks, mouse and PSU for £56.50. 4GB Compact flash card and interface £37.99 (for the internal HD). New kickstart rom chip £7.99. Total spent £102.48 (including postage). Fired it up today and all working fine, played Turrican 2 and Alien Breed SE.
You can't just link an A600 up to a PC monitor, it outputs the wrong scan-rate, you'd need a scan doubler to do that. You need to plug it into a TV via SCART or S-Video for best quality, or composite if not.
Dan Wood - kookytech.net or an Amiga monitor, I have a M1438S, great CRT monitor.
I forgot the 68000 is only 16bit on the bus itself.
But it would make a difference if you have an 020 card or better but no ram on the board.
But in the this case it would be cheaper to get an internal ram expansion anyway.
love my Amiga 600 - cool platform for gaming old school ... ultimate hipster machine ;)
hi Dan are you still using it
Great Amiga videos, btw. :D I'm not sure whether the electronics were good enough at that time, but I think Commodore missed out on integrating the PSU here... the A600 was still stuck with that bulky old external brick. :D
I got one but immediately returned it for an A500. Everbody back then had A500 and the absence of numerical pad was a bit of disappointment. I think it was also incompatible with some software
This has ECS right
Matthew Neathery yes
Some games have native HD installers so you don't need WHDload.. not that many though. A few it works if you just copy the files to a drawer on the HD.. though not many of those either.
Although I have several Amiga machines I never owned an A600 until now! I've bought the PCMCIA and Compact Flash for transfers. Is it tricky to get drivers for this to work? I have ideas to fully restore this machine and add some extras :)