[HN Gopher] Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Fav...
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Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Favorite
Author : rbanffy
Score : 79 points
Date : 2025-03-16 17:28 UTC (5 hours ago)
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| EvanAnderson wrote:
| I think the article is a little hard on the 600 in its stock
| configuration. (That's not to say that Commodore did a great job
| with it, in terms of product-line placement. Oh, Commodore...
| >sigh<)
|
| The 600 isn't a "repackaged Amiga 1000" or a "cut-down version of
| the Amiga 500". It didn't make sense in the line-up when
| Commodore introduced it, but it's definitely a step-up from the
| A1000 and A500. Having the Enhanced Chip Set[0] meant getting the
| Productivity video modes on a multisync monitor.
|
| The internal ATA controller was also a big enhancement as
| compared to the A500 and A1000, too. Laptop IDE/ATA drives were
| getting pretty common. When equipped with a hard disk it was
| vastly more portable than an A500 (w/ a "sidecar" hard disk drive
| module).
|
| Having the built-in color composite video output was a "win" for
| just plugging it into a TV or VCR. Again, that helped with
| portability as compared to an A500.
|
| As a retro machine it is a cute little machine. The community has
| definitely stepped-up with enhancements for the A600, though.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Enhanced_Chip_Set
| Kimitri wrote:
| Exactly. Commodore made a mistake when they introduced it but I
| loved mine to bits! After owning it for about a year I upgraded
| it with a 68030 turbo (incl. 4 megs of fast mem, an FPU and an
| MMU) and a 4 gig IBM Travelstar HD. The upgrade made it one of
| the flakiest bits of computing hardware I've ever used (you'd
| be lucky to use it for an hour without it crashing) but it was
| just so frigging cool! I painted it pink and purple and
| labelled it "Sikakone" ("Pig machine" in Finnish).
| afro88 wrote:
| Agree, definitely not a repackaged 1000 / 500. It also shipped
| with Kickstart 2.0 / Workbench 2.0 which was a pretty decent
| upgrade on 1.3 that the A500 had. And it shipped with 1MB of
| chip RAM, rather than 512KB. 1MB chip wasn't possible in the
| A500 without soldering IIRC. Some games utilised that, though
| bot many.
|
| I think once the 1200 came out it was just an odd product in
| the lineup. The 1200 made way more sense given the massive
| upgrade across CPU, memory, chipset and OS
| mjg59 wrote:
| The 500 Plus had ECS and supported up to 2MB chip RAM without
| soldering (and shipped with Kickstart 2.04)
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Yes though it was pretty easy to update the 500 to KS2.0.
| Just replace one chip that was already socketed. I think you
| could even reuse the original with an eprom burner.
| abrugsch wrote:
| I updated my A500 to kickstart 2.0 but I never did the 1mb
| chip RAM Agnus mod
| abrugsch wrote:
| It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and
| enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also
| already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0 The
| stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and
| sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded
| the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top
| copper layer on the motherboard) Long term it was cheaper to
| produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the
| production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell
| it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived
| at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack
| of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and
| games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to
| A600 to reflect that. The biggest problem IMHO is that the
| 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole
| product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were
| expecting. Basically at the time it just felt like a massive
| let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product,
| but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.
| derriz wrote:
| Sure but none of those improvements had any sort of "wow"
| factor for the target audience - who were primarily interested
| in graphics, sound and CPU speed - particularly wrt to gaming.
| ECS is a marginal improvement, otherwise you're still looking
| at 7 year old technology. What killed the Amiga as a mass
| market device in Europe IMHO were the new consoles - Megadrive
| and the like which blew it out of the water in terms of eye
| candy and speed.
| krige wrote:
| But MegaDrive games don't look inherently better than OCS
| Amiga ones - and sound worse to boot. Compare Desert Strike
| or Battle Squadron which had a version for both systems.
| Maybe SNES was an improvement; the main advantage was the
| price of the system instead (and the hidden cost was that the
| games were 2x - 3x as expensive, which added up quickly).
| icedchai wrote:
| ECS barely added anything for the average user. Almost nobody
| used the productivity or weird super-hires modes.
|
| They could've skipped the A600 entirely and just left the
| A500 Plus on the market.
| A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote:
| Those complaints ring true. I had one and you ran into its
| limitations almost immediately, but that would not likely be an
| issue were it not for the fact that not everything was compatible
| between a500, a1200 and a600. But even that wasn't the biggest
| issue. The most amusing issue, in retrospect -- I hated this as a
| kid, was lack of full keyboard, because, please try not to laugh,
| I could not play civilization properly since it had no numpad. It
| was years later before I could enjoy moving diagonally. Eh, to be
| a child again.
| daneel_w wrote:
| The A500 and A600 are near identical. The tiny differences
| between them are in fact not incompatibilities in that sense.
| The A1200 is quite a different upgrade, and software making use
| of its new custom hardware features (or 68020-specific
| instructions) will obviously not run on the A600/500+/500,
| though the A1200 will run any correctly written piece of
| software from the past.
| t0mek wrote:
| I've always seen A600 more like a budget version of A1200
| rather than a new variant of A500: better graphics chip, IDE
| port, PCMCIA and new look-and-feel of the Workbench 2.04 (at
| the first sight hardly distinguishable from the Workbench
| 3.0) gave a taste of something new.
| daneel_w wrote:
| I feel that "budget A1200" is a misnomer. The IDE port was
| its strongest addition, but internally it's still just an
| A500 with ECS instead of OCS, and that never really panned
| out as leverage. Not even the additional 512KB of chipmem
| made a splash. No more than a handful of titles,
| productivity and games alike, took any advantage of it.
| Incomparable to the upgrade seen with AGA and a 14 MHz 020.
| Findecanor wrote:
| Indeed, it is a shame that the A600 didn't come with
| Kickstart/Workbench 3.x.
|
| It had other improvements than just support for the AGA
| chipset's video modes. "Datatypes" were pretty neat. Thanks
| to it, the Amiga got PNG support in _all_ web browsers
| before many other platforms got it at all.
| bogantech wrote:
| The A500+ already had ECS graphics, up to 2MB chip ram &
| Kick 2.04
| t0mek wrote:
| The article doesn't mention the recent development in Amiga
| extension cards - PiStorm is an easy (and affordable) way to max
| out the specs of any Amiga, A600 included.
| whitehexagon wrote:
| I think MNT / mntre also have some Amiga expansion cards for
| graphics and sound. For me I'll keep my memories for fear of
| being disappointed. Maybe if the mini had included shadow of
| the beast, lemmings, bubble bobble, great ghiana sisters, I
| might have been more tempted. But then I would have wanted
| devpac and a true 680n0 chip + the fun chiplets to play with.
| AnotherGoodName wrote:
| The big issue was less technical and more market based. I
| remember in 92 you could easily get an Amiga 500 for under $500
| that this sold for. People were upgrading and stores were doing
| clearances of old stock. So it competed with a flood of Amiga
| 500s.
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| My god, have you looked up the price of an Amiga on eBay in
| response to this thread? I did and it's horrifying.
| abrugsch wrote:
| They've been horrifying since about 2020. I could sell up and
| put my kids through a good college!
| walrus01 wrote:
| NeXT workstations and cubes on eBay are also quite ridiculous,
| compared to what they were 15 or 20 years ago.
| foft wrote:
| If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with
| recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is
| mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more
| details.
|
| It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes
| custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at
| extending the registers to more modern standards.
|
| It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using
| more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on
| Power.
|
| Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of
| the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being
| consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.
|
| Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but
| there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the
| Amiga 600.
|
| Many people will say you can get similar performance with
| emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied
| microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in
| future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-
| microsecond level timing.
|
| There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating
| the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original
| hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI
| onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.
| amiga386 wrote:
| I mean, sure, but, as the Vampire makes clear in it's name...
| it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin
| as a hat. You can also stick an Raspberry Pi running E-UAE
| inside an Amiga case for pretty much the same thing (a thing
| that's definitely not an Amiga, emulating being an Amiga, in
| the shell of an Amiga)
| snvzz wrote:
| Worth looking into pimiga and amiberry, if using raspberry pi
| for Amiga emulation.
|
| Of course, retroarch has an Amiga emulator as well.
| Keyframe wrote:
| older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-
| wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great.
| I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to
| compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do
| the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an
| accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm.
|
| I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I
| have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with
| 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm
| after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out.
| B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's
| faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to
| install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo
| coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600
| I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock
| (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the
| full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or
| advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060
| anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I
| can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute
| code.
|
| Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors),
| I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets
| most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an
| amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works
| immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a
| keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd
| recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of
| WinUAE on their own comp.
| robinsonb5 wrote:
| And for anyone who doesn't mind going down a massive rabbithole
| there are many variants of Minimig, the original FPGA-based
| recreation of the Amiga - most of which are on more affordable
| hardware than the Vampire - and open-source to boot.
|
| The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower
| than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a
| result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower
| still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for
| chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest
| nearly-an-Amiga...
| snvzz wrote:
| The vampire v4 is too proprietary, has too many
| incompatibilities and there's way too much drama around it.
|
| For a modern FPGA setup, I'd look at miSTer. There's an
| excellent miniMig core for it, complete with AGA support, and
| it is open source hardware.
| jamesy0ung wrote:
| The Vampire is way overpriced and the extensions it adds are
| useless because they only work on other Vamprire machines. The
| PiStorm is much, much cheaper, and emulates a standard 68k
| while continuing to use the Amiga chipset, and does it faster
| than the Vampire.
| meling wrote:
| I remember spending my whole years (part-time) work salary on an
| Amiga 4000 in 1993 or 94. I miss that computer. But man, my then
| girlfriend (now wife) was pretty horrified that I spent so much
| money on a computer... I don't remember what other plans she had
| for my money, haha.
| doener wrote:
| Reddit discussions about the same article:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1jcrtct/amiga_600_th...
| krige wrote:
| I've had a stock A600 for over a decade, it was okay. Sure I had
| to run a ReloKick for some games but the OS was vastly superior
| to the awful blue-orange flat shading ugly 1.3 topaz font hell of
| A500. Sure A500+ existed but over here (central europe) it was
| very rare and it was missing the IDE port anyway. Ironically for
| me the greatest issue was lack of the numpad, which caused issues
| with some software, _and_ forced a very lasting aversion to
| numpad usage on me.
|
| From today's perspective, A600 is... annoying, which I've found
| out a few years ago. The architecture choices are hard to work
| with: the PCMCIA slot limits the amount of memory you can work
| with (well, unless you don't want to use it but it's almost
| indispensable, esp. for data transfer), the internal bus only
| accepts "slow" RAM - the desired Fast RAM (CPU exclusive) can
| only be added by expansions put directly over the CPU itself.
| Sure, there are Vampires and PiStorms but the compatibility of
| both can be a bit spotty, and if you're dumping that much on the
| system you must love it specifically, lest you'd just go with an
| A1200 which is superior in every respect.
|
| On that note, currently the easiest no-brainer Amiga to actually
| have fun with without eating your budget too much is an A1200.
| Slap an 8MB fast ram expansion, an IDE CF controller, and 3.2.2
| OS/ROM it's ready to go. WHDLoad installs exist for every
| important game and many obscure ones too, data transfer can go
| either via PCMCIA>CF card, or a Parallel Port contraption that
| reads microSD cards. And if you want more power (though I can't
| imagine why, unless you want to run Doom on it), TerribleFire
| cards aren't too pricey. 128MB RAM + 030/060 CPU is a substantial
| boost (note: games, especially early 3D, will break with that
| much power).
|
| Just watch for leaky capacitors (thankfully there's a whole
| industry for fixing this), and for the love of god don't use the
| stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore).
| hdaz0017 wrote:
| I might be biased as the A600 was the first computer I bought
| with my own money, but there was no way I would have bought a
| 386SX over the A600.
|
| This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's
| fine.
|
| I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly
| did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so
| they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do
| more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games
| were there and the games were great to play, the first game I
| bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer,
| soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 - 100
| games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making
| Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I
| then bought a A1200 but it was not the same...
|
| Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not
| saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed
| there would be a release at some point.
|
| Three words, plug and play!
|
| I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's
| package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy
| it.
|
| I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch
| disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an
| inch out )) lol It showcased the A600 and the style of the
| machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked
| sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so.
|
| The A500, A600 and A1200 are all prone to discoloration....
|
| I still have two A600's and one A1200 and all of them are still
| working, not bad for a computer that is 33 years old and took a
| battering for many years.
|
| :)
| erickhill wrote:
| > This article is so tilted towards the American market and
| that's fine.
|
| The author is from the US and is relating his experience that
| what he saw around him at the time. Every article I read about
| the Amiga from someone in the UK or EU is also "tilted" based
| on their experiences. There was no global experience when it
| came to the Amiga, other than it started in the US first and
| died in the UK/EU. By the time the 1200 made a big splash
| overseas, the US was well down another path - the road that
| ultimately became everyone's. So there's a time-shift at play
| and a regional one. How that played into the PC/Mac market in
| their respective regions is really up to economics at the time.
|
| >I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the
| A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able
| to buy it.
|
| Agree about wishing AGA was way too little, way too late. I
| wish they'd released it no later than 1990 rather than the end
| of 1992. Maybe then Commodore could have kept the massive US
| market's interest longer than they did. The choices Commodore
| made, well... it's no wonder what happened, happened.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Also, the article mentions the AGA chip with no introduction of
| it. Some sort of editing mix up?
| whywhywhywhy wrote:
| >A stock Amiga 600 can play a Commander Keen-style game just as
| smoothly as a faster PC.
|
| Look... comparing Amiga platformers to Commander Keen is
| insulting. Amiga had "Genesis style games" not "Commander Keen
| style games"
|
| Amiga games looked and sounded like this
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtLGDywZlg
|
| Not this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKHUOKVzo0Q
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(page generated 2025-03-16 23:00 UTC)