[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 : 153 points
Date : 2025-03-16 17:28 UTC (1 days 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).
| amiga386 wrote:
| That sounds awesome, do you have any pictures of your
| Sikakone?
| Kimitri wrote:
| Unfortunately not. It was quite the setup! The A600 had a
| built-in dock for a hard drive but the turbo took its
| place. I ran a long ATA cable through the PCMCIA slot and
| had the drive just sit on the table next to the computer.
| The turbo also ran extremely hot (it had a plastic cover
| that started to melt almost immediately so I took it off)
| which meant I couldn't keep the case closed. I propped it
| open by shoving a 3,5 inch floppy between the disk drive
| and the case and have it sit there completely vertically.
| This allowed for enough air flow to keep the thing from
| overheating too much. Good times!
| 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)
| afro88 wrote:
| Ah true, good point. Forgot about the 500 Plus.
| 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
| wkat4242 wrote:
| Neither did I but the fast ram upgrade module was pretty
| good too.
| 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.
| icedchai wrote:
| I'd disagree. Chipset and architecture wise, there is not
| much that makes the A600 different from an A500. ECS is
| almost zero improvement over OCS for most use cases. Both are
| on the same old ~7mhz 68000 CPU, which was absolutely ancient
| by 1992 when the A600 was released. The A500 was a cost
| reduced A1000, and there is little real difference to the
| user (other than kickstart in ROM.)
|
| If anything, the A600 is a downgrade because it's missing the
| Zorro expansion bus...
| 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.
| amiga386 wrote:
| Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better
| A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the
| A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDDs which
| were a fraction of the cost of SCSI HDDs with some
| expensive third party adapter.
|
| But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles
| better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very
| cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB
| 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and
| only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big
| leap was from 1.3 to 2.0
|
| (of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd
| probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't
| run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if
| you wanted)
| daneel_w wrote:
| Those who were "demo/intro-brained" (the demo scene being
| the 2nd largest user segment) were unaffected.
|
| Commodore actually did release an official KS2.0x ROM
| upgrade for the A500.
| 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
| bspinner wrote:
| If I remember correctly most of the 600s compatibility issues
| could be worked around by adjusting settings via _early startup
| control system_. Eg by switching off newer hardware features.
| 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.
| ForOldHack wrote:
| I never heard of a graphics card for the Amiga until a decade
| later. In 92 I bought a IBM clone that cost 1/2 the price of
| an Amiga. One of my roommates had an Amiga 1000, and he got
| another 600 when it came out. In 96, I got one in trade for a
| Macintosh, while the roommate and I both got Lucas
| Acellerators and IDE interfaces for pennies on the dollar. We
| played games that used the serial ports. We had 1mb of chip
| ram and 2 mb of fast ram, the price of which was falling
| fast.
|
| I think the lucas boards were 25mhz MC68030,and within a few
| weeks,we had gotten 33mhz parts w/ FPUs and soldered on new
| crystals. Such an incredible source of cheap fun, while the I
| world was struggling with widows 1,2,3. The Amiga was, as was
| claimed, head and hands above the PC until the 486s became
| cheap 8~10 years later. Amigas ruled. Too bad commodore were
| such schmucks.
| 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.
| caned wrote:
| Is USD 1-1.2k for a clean, recapped Amiga 1200, with newest
| ROMs, updated PS and TF '030 accelerator horrifying? If so,
| call me a fool!
|
| (FWIW, I acquired mine two years ago, and it looks like recent
| sales on ebay are in the same ballpark...)
| bluescrn wrote:
| Yeah, prices have shot way up over the last 2-3 years, and not
| just for the big-box Amigas, even A1200 prices have got fairly
| silly. But people have a whole lot of love for the Amiga, it
| was a revolutionary machine at the time, and for many people it
| was their introduction to doing creative things with computers,
| as well as the gaming.
|
| And retro gaming/computing is a growing hobby. There's so much
| new hardware and software out there for old platforms now,
| letting you add never-before-possible upgrades (e.g. PiStorm
| for the Amiga), get decent output to a modern TV, and sometimes
| give them shiny new cases and keyboards. Which is great if you
| already had a collection of retro machines, but not so much if
| you're trying to buy them now, with increased demand and ever
| diminishing supply.
| 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 its name...
| it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin
| as a hat. You can also stick a 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.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > ...I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator.
| It gets most use out of all of the above. ... What's also
| cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just
| like amiga was.
|
| Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much
| improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like
| thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind
| of usage.
| Keyframe wrote:
| _RPi 500_
|
| Oh, I haven't been paying attention, haven't realized
| this came out in the meantime! Thanks
| 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,
| besides costing an arm and a leg.
|
| 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.
| jug wrote:
| Vampire is real hardware alright, but is basically just
| emulation in that layer instead. The hardware has nothing to do
| with an Amiga. So I don't see much being won over traditional
| emulation in this case, other than perhaps improved input
| latency and performance.
|
| If I were to go there, I'd go MiSTer or a clone instead, and
| save a load of cash in the process. You'll get an A1200 level +
| AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the
| content from the Amiga scene.
| johnklos wrote:
| The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others,
| off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important
| and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply
| saying they weren't going to work on it then.
|
| When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.
|
| After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being
| fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other
| things.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Didn't the original Amiga MC68000 use soft-FP anyway? Not
| sure why this would matter.
| vidarh wrote:
| The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird
| space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in
| which classic hardware they care about - most users who
| stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an
| accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.
|
| At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction
| set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very
| opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga
| could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.
|
| I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one
| (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for
| it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's
| mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.
|
| I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried
| to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see
| them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to
| see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and
| MMU first.
|
| But it's their project - they're of course free to do what
| they want.
| danby wrote:
| I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind
| it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd
| graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual
| extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.
|
| Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset
| architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other
| than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
|
| I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their
| 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching
| off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is
| a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they
| want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves
| understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their
| Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a
| 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing
| I think.
|
| Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based
| GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit
| your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
| pjmlp wrote:
| As someone that was the only PC guy among a group of friends
| all Amiga owners, I don't think these systems do justice to the
| original systems.
|
| What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of
| computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from
| running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features
| present on AmigaOS.
| 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).
| renewedrebecca wrote:
| > and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll
| kill your system (thanks Commodore)
|
| That is definitely a Commodore tradition. I had a C64 back that
| had a PSU die in 1985 and took out all of the DRAM chips.
| danby wrote:
| It isn't true though. C64 PSUs would fail high and fry
| downstream chips and passives. Amiga PSUs are designed to
| fail low, and with the exception of some exceptionally rare
| faults, they won't fry your computer if the capacitors fail
| krige wrote:
| It fried mine, twice in a row. Lost the A600, which came
| with A1200 PSU, and then an A500 to a different PSU.
| Additionally, the second(ary) issue with A1200 PSU is it's
| barely strong enough to support the base hardware
| configuration and will make expanded systems unstable.
| danby wrote:
| Your PSU issues aren't actually all that common. The
| A1200 PSU being trash was a prime example of commodore's
| decades long costing cutting horrors.
| 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.
| layer8 wrote:
| Nah, I was an Amiga 500 user in Europe at the time and was
| looking at maybe getting an Amiga 2000 or 3000, but with VGA
| games like Comanche and Ultima VII being released on PC, great
| IDEs like Turbo Pascal/C/C++ available, the value proposition
| of the Amiga just wasn't really there anymore, the writing was
| on the wall. And so with a heavy heart I bought a 486DX
| instead. I agree insofar as I wouldn't have opted for a 386SX.
| nikau wrote:
| Pretty much exactly the same - I was at university at the
| time and heard of this slackware Linux thing - my Amiga was
| hardly used after that.
| nikau wrote:
| Doom was indeed the death knell of the Amiga - most Amiga games
| were still targeting ECS due to market share and were pretty
| much rehashes of old titles.
|
| Doom came along and was the first PC game that was standout
| with "must have" wow factor. I remember spending hours late one
| night getting 3 person multi player working via some ghetto IPX
| over serial hack.
| nmstoker wrote:
| Interesting.
|
| Also, the article mentions the AGA chip with no introduction of
| it. Some sort of editing mix up?
| ForOldHack wrote:
| AI was not there, not trained properly. Let it go back to
| writing code.
| 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
| floren wrote:
| And Keen 4 was more fun.
| snvzz wrote:
| Politely disagree.
| snvzz wrote:
| >just as smoothly as a faster PC
|
| No. _actually_ smooth, unlike a PC.
|
| One game frame per each frame sent to the screen. Which the PC
| would only achieve many years later when it got raw power via
| 3d acceleration.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| AIUI the main limitation with early PC graphics was (1) it
| was a dumb framebuffer and (2) bandwidth from the system to
| said framebuffer was too low to replace the entire screen in
| a single frame. This only really got solved comprehensively
| in the late 1990s or so, hence prior to that timeframe you
| were always more or less relying on some kind of "trick" to
| achieve smooth video output.
| mikepavone wrote:
| > By the time you added a monitor and a hard drive to get the
| system you really wanted, it cost closer to $1,000. At that
| price, you could get an off-brand PC with a VGA monitor.
|
| So I decided to check some prices in 1992 computer catalogs and
| I'm not sure this is really true. Looking at the Tandy
| catalog[0], you could get a Tandy 1000 RLX with a 10 MHz 286,
| 512k of RAM, VGA and a monitor for $1K, but it didn't come with a
| hard drive at that price. The same catalog also lists a Tandy
| 1000 RL with a 9.5 MHz 8086, 512k of RAM and CGA/Tandy graphics
| for $500 without monitor. I think the 600 actually fairs pretty
| well against that machine.
|
| Looking at a Sears catalog from 1992, they have a Packard Bell
| 386SX with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB HD for $1100, but without a
| monitor. The cheapest monitor option on that page was another
| $290.
|
| Obviously two random catalogs doesn't give you comprehensive
| pricing data, but at least from this quick look it does seem like
| the 600 was reasonably competitive at the $500 price point it was
| sold at.
|
| Seems to me the bigger problems were higher up the product line.
| Not having a real response to the rise of VGA (first introduced
| 1987) until October 1992 was a huge miss.
|
| [0]
| https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/c1992_rsc-23.htm...
|
| [1]
| https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1992-Sea...
| pjmlp wrote:
| In Portugal it certainly wasn't, and I am quite sure, given I
| got a 386SX at 20 MHz (with Turbo!), 40MB, SVGA monitor in that
| year, as upgrade to a Timex 2068 which I had been holding to
| since 1986.
|
| It was about 15000 euros (300723 escudos) in 1992's money,
| which given our economy meant a credit spread over three years.
|
| Meanwhile, Amigas were at a quarter of that value, and most
| folks used the TV anyway, I think I only saw Amigas plugged
| into monitors at the computer stores.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| I agree. The A600 was a costcut and future proofing of A500
| with some extra features.
|
| The disappointment was A1200 and A4000. The A1200 was not
| enough for gaming, A4000 was not enough for workstation use.
| Both could have been so much better with pretty minor changes.
| vidarh wrote:
| I remember how we were fuming at the A4000 opting for IDE
| over SCSI, and the other ways it was hampered, and how ugly
| it was. The A4000's was PC-ification of the Amiga without the
| upsides - things like SCSI helped offset the anaemic higher
| end M68k CPU's. An A3000 + faster CPU + flicker fixer built
| in + AGA, would've been vastly superior. Basically Dave
| Haynie's A3000+ prototype.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| And MMU... and CPU daughter cards on the Zorro bus with
| local RAM for things like "distributed" Lightwave
| rendering. It would have made performance better for the
| rather price insensitive pro segment.
|
| Commodore basically catered to _no_ market segment.
|
| Edit: the A1200 could have been better (twice the speed for
| calculations) if it had some just a tiny sliver of fast RAM
| instead of only chip RAM. And so on. It should also have
| had a VGA connector, it wouldn't have cost more than a few
| cents. People used TVs because the couldn't find multisync
| monitors. Commodore, a fractal of bad business decisions.
| vidarh wrote:
| Have you read Brian Bagnall's series of books on
| Commodore? It really digs into the full universe of
| badness that was Commodore management in excruciating
| detail.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| No, thanks, I'll get ahold of them.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| The A1200 lacking fastmem out of the box does seem like a
| strange decision, but in this case I believe Commodore
| actually listened to game developers. Having more chipmem
| instead meant that games could effortlessly load more
| graphics, music and sampled audio.
|
| As for the VGA connector, there was a cheap Amiga
| RGB->VGA adapter available. Connectivity wasn't the
| problem. The issue was that VGA monitors couldn't cope
| with a 15 kHz PAL/NTSC signal. Many didn't work with the
| 50 Hz PAL refresh, either. In order for a VGA connector
| to be meaningful, hardware would've been needed to
| address this, adding to the cost of the machine - and
| ruining the 50 Hz sync of a massive, pre-existing games
| library.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| If it had even 32 _kilo_ bytes of fast mem, (it had 2
| megs of chip, same as the original Playstation) it would
| have made a huge difference for games.
|
| Back in the day, people didn't even _know_ Amiga 1200
| could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special
| adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of. If
| it had a VGA connector people would know they could run
| productivity software on a regular monitor. Having a TV
| for gaming and a monitor for word processing would have
| been _fine_. There 's precedent with Atari supporting
| both regular (TV-like frequencies) monitors and the
| monochrome monitor for productivity.
|
| (IIRC you had to press both mouse buttons at boot or
| something like that to get VGA frequencies. All of this
| could have been made automatic if the VGA monitor was
| plugged in or something. BOM cost would have been almost
| 0. No strategic thinking at all at Commodore leadership,
| no understanding of the market.)
| arexxbifs wrote:
| 32 k of fastmem probably wouldn't have made much
| difference at all. A single routine or two could maybe
| run faster, but data for them would still have to be
| mostly in chipmem. Plus, you'd need to add space and
| tracing for it on the motherboard. Once you've done that,
| 32 k seems a bit pointless. Then you might as well have
| added a SIMM socket, too. The initial doubled speed and
| increased video bandwith compared to the A500 was already
| a major step up for the type of Amiga games that were
| popular when the A1200 was designed.
|
| Whether or not people knew of the scandoubled modes back
| in the day, well, me and all my friends certainly did,
| and all the A1200 reviews I've read mentions them. Having
| both a TV and a VGA monitor sort of defeats the purpose
| of a cheap, compact entry-level machine. Atari users
| typically had _either_, not _both_: The monochrome
| monitor was for the DTP and music studio markets.
|
| There was no mode switching in the early startup menu,
| apart from being able to toggle between NTSC and PAL.
| Selection of AGA scandoubled modes were made in the
| Workbench preferences. Adding some kind of auto-sensing
| hardware would add to the cost of the machine and require
| a rewrite of Workbench to cope with this in some way
| without interfering with screenmode preferences (and what
| if you indeed had both a TV and a VGA monitor hooked up
| at the same time?).
|
| In hindsight, I think the A1200 was a decent solution to
| a hard problem: constructing a cheap, worthwhile upgrade
| while remaining compatible with as much existing software
| and hardware as possible.
| einr wrote:
| _Back in the day, people didn 't even know Amiga 1200
| could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special
| adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of._
|
| The Commodore monitors which were released at the time
| _intended for use with A1200 /A4000,_ the 1940 and 1942,
| had a _permanently attached 15-pin VGA cable._ I know
| because I have one for my A1200.
|
| These monitors were dual-sync 15 and 31 KHz devices, and
| were perfectly usable as a VGA monitor with a PC.
| Probably not a lot of PC users bought them.
|
| But if you bought the 1940 for use with the Amiga 1200,
| you couldn't _plug it into the computer without a 15- >23
| pin adapter._ I'm sure it came with the adapter in the
| box, but still...
| nikau wrote:
| I recall reading commodore had a glut of PC cases and
| tooling they wanted to use up, hence the weird case for the
| A4000 with the mouse ports cut out inconveniently on the
| side.
| doener wrote:
| Yes, also the lack of peripherals. Amiga had way better
| graphics and sound in 1985 to 1987 than almost all PCs with no
| extra peripherals. But with PC compatibles becoming more
| established also the the range of graphics cards and sound
| cards grew.
| helpfulContrib wrote:
| In the US, in the 90's, there were many, many other cottage-
| shop PC builders, setting up shop.
|
| So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you
| could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's
| Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it,
| like .. on the regular, much cheaper.
|
| Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in
| those days.
|
| (Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had
| pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out
| Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often
| pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)
| bombcar wrote:
| The 90s was days spent looking at advertisements in the free
| local weekly that were just lists of parts and prices; you
| could build your own or have one assembled for big discounts
| compared to pre-made machines.
|
| And for home users and even smaller businesses - that's just
| what you did.
| mikepavone wrote:
| My general feeling is that folks tend to have somewhat
| unreliable memories about how early certain things got cheap.
| Catalogs are not perfect, but they don't change over time.
| That said, I managed to find a Computer Shopper from August
| 1992 on the Internet Archive [0]. There definitely are some
| systems in there advertised at the $1K price point with HD
| and monitor (though generally no sound card), but also a lot
| of sellers with nothing that cheap for a complete system.
|
| Not sure what the proper conclusion is about how competitive
| the pricing of the 600 was from that, but I think the catalog
| does reinforce how much further in the hole they were a bit
| higher up the price chart. If you wanted to spend a bit more,
| the only 1st party offering from Commodore until the fall of
| 1992 was the Amiga 3000. Not sure what they were charging for
| one of those at the time, but apart from the builtin SCSI I
| don't think it compares very favorably with a 386DX with SVGA
| and those weren't all that expensive by then. The 4000 did
| launch a little after this catalog, but it was priced much
| higher than the 486 systems that were already on the market.
|
| [0] https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-august-1992/
| arexxbifs wrote:
| For arcade-style platform games and shmups, the A600 was
| competitively priced compared to PC:s, at least for a year or
| so. The biggest problem with the Amiga line in general was that
| it couldn't feasibly keep up with 486 CPU:s and the game
| complexity they enabled. Consumer-level Amigas were supposed to
| be cheap and cheerful - that was their selling point. Adding a
| 68040 (or even a fast 68030) would've pushed the price point
| into another territory entirely.
| danby wrote:
| To be honest there's lots of little factual inaccuracies in
| that piece. The notion that the A600 was "fully software-
| compatible with the A500" just isn't true.
| roryirvine wrote:
| Similarly, claiming that the SoundBlaster had "22 voice
| sound" vs the Amiga's 4 voices. Yes, later SBs had a 22
| channel FM synth chip, but that's not remotely the same
| thing!
|
| It would have been more accurate to say that as PCs became
| faster they became capable of mixing multiple audio samples
| together before playing them through a stereo (ie. "2 voice")
| DSP - using the greater CPU power to match (and, eventually,
| exceed) the Amiga's sound capabilities.
|
| In general, I suspect the author is misunderstanding
| secondary sources, rather than misremembering first-hand
| experience.
| danby wrote:
| The Amiga's audio reproduction is an odd beast. Incredibly
| sophisticated one hand then completely hamstrung by the
| fact that stereo planning has to be done in software. So
| you either run it as 4 independent mono channels, or you
| devote lots of CPU time to software panning, which rules
| doing that if anything else CPU intensive is going on. So
| you basically can't have stereophonic audio in games.
| wyclif wrote:
| As an owner of an Amiga 500, I remember watching the 600 flop
| even though I was mildly interested in upgrading, but he's
| right that this was the point where a lot of users like me
| threw in the towel and said "Right, I'm just getting a PC." And
| I did, and it was probably the best decision I could have made
| at that time.
| Fr0styMatt88 wrote:
| For me, Wolfenstein 3D planted the seed and then Doom sealed
| the deal. Not to mention I was a fan of Sierra games back in
| the day and the Amiga conversions of the 256-colour VGA games
| were trash (except KQ6 which I believe wasn't done by Sierra
| themselves for the Amiga version). Which was a shame because
| arguably the Amiga had the best versions of the AGI games
| (better colour palettes, use of the Tandy 3-voice soundtrack
| as standard) and great 16-colour SCI conversions (use of
| sound samples from the MT-32 versions of the soundtracks as
| far as I can tell looking back).
| kryptonomist wrote:
| From at I remember, at least in Europe, it's only from
| 1994-1995 that you could start thinking having a better
| proposition with a PC than with an Amiga/Atari ST. In order to
| surpass what you had on an Amiga 500/600 in terms of games,
| your needed at least a small 386 VGA.
|
| Before that, the only way to get a configuration at the same
| price was typically some Amstrad PC (typically the popular
| PC1512), far less capable in terms of graphics and music.
| Dabbling_Dion wrote:
| Meh. Whole Amiga concept was a glorified game console for
| PAL/NTSC TV standard. Once PC market moved aboive using TV
| monitors, whole Amiga lineup was doomed.
|
| As anything Commodore ever did, Amiga was far overengineered for
| what it did.
|
| That being said, there are only two Amigas worth remembering: -
| A500 as original one ( A1000 was overpriced crap) - A1200 as a
| cheap successor. Its upgrade value was "meh", but it was cheap.
| And there were games, actually using those extras. And it had a
| cheap HDD option (used an IDE drive).
| krige wrote:
| Except the system was designed with a productivity display
| oriented RGB port that worked, and its main selling point was
| the hardware, not the games. My stock 1200 can output 1440x550
| res and more, and it works just fine.
|
| Deluxe Paint, tracker music, Video Toaster w/Lightwave, all
| Amiga achievements. And all systems were extremely good value
| for the dollar until late VGA era. Europe understood and
| appreciated that; US unfortunately had Commodore main branch,
| which was very self-sabotaging, to put it mlildly.
| Dabbling_Dion wrote:
| "Productivity oriented RGB display"...
|
| I remember going through a TON of pirated SW to get useful
| PCB CAD programs on Amiga (being the graphic "beast" of the
| time) and wasted a ton on non-PC harware (basically
| everything from Sinclair QL to Atari ST lines and Amigas,
| from 500 to 1200) only to admit defeat years later and settle
| on plain old DOS PC and Tango.
|
| Amiga was ATROCIOUS for everything besides gaming. Its
| graphics was great only on paper - until you had it on the
| desk and havign to use it daily.
| nikau wrote:
| It wasn't overengineered, it was well engineered.
|
| It was cheaper than a PC and much nicer to use - Windows was
| terrible in that era, the janky mouse jumping all over the
| place under load due to no hardware sprite and serial buffer
| overrun.
|
| Meanwhile an Amiga under 100% CPU would have a silky smooth
| mouse due to hardware mouse port tracking and sprite pointer.
|
| Then you had stuff like autoconfig hardware that was 10 years
| ahead of its time.
| Dabbling_Dion wrote:
| Practically no one was using AMiga for its OS. All the people
| would ever see is a Kickstart as tool to load their game.
|
| Amiga was smooth just as long as CPU usage was low and as
| long one used the stuff that its chipset could do.
|
| And all that "smoothness" was useless once one got above what
| TV can do. I used PC for DOS Tango (schematic and PCB CAD)
| for example and even cheap Tseng ET-4000 card with 1MB would
| put Amiga to shame as it could do 1280x1024x16 colors.
|
| Yes, animation speed wasn't great, but it worked. Two years
| later I had Diamond Stealth 2MB which could do 1600x1200x16
| colors, running circles around anything any Amiga could do.
| bluescrn wrote:
| The Amiga brought us DPaint, OctaMED, AMOS, Blitz Basic, and a
| whole lot more.
|
| People bought it for the games, then got interested in the
| creative possibilities. At the very least it inspired a
| generation of game developers, digital artists, and electronic
| music creators.
|
| Meanwhile, many PCs of the time only had PC speaker audio
| capabilities, the horrible palette of EGA, and the inability to
| scroll the screen smoothly. And a DOS prompt rather than a
| smoothly-multitasking GUI.
|
| Yes, there were only a few short years before the PC caught
| up/overtook the Amiga. But for those few years, the Amiga was
| something really special.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| https://archive.ph/17oZA
| saltysalt wrote:
| I owned an Amiga 600 when I was a kid, absolutely loved it! A
| great gaming machine.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| Nice article, the A600 was indeed a strange machine to be
| released between the A500+ and A1200, and the PCMCIA port was a
| curious choice at the time.
|
| Some thoughts:
|
| * Commodore could have added a faster 68000, and it seems like a
| good idea in theory. But in order for a faster CPU to have any
| meaningful impact, they would have needed to add either a
| sizeable cache or, preferably, some real fastmem (memory that
| isn't shared with the custom graphics and audio hardware). This
| would have raised the cost significantly.
|
| * The text doesn't mention the Amiga 500 Plus, also released in
| 1992, just before the A600. It was an upgraded A500 featuring
| Kickstart 2.0, the ECS chipset and 1 meg of chipmem. People who
| had bought an A500+ felt fooled by Commodore, and rightly so:
| Adding a hard drive to the A600 meant the cost of a stand-alone
| 2.5" IDE drive. Adding one to an A500/+ involved a sidecar
| expansion that cost about as much as the computer itself.
|
| * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which
| means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for PS199, an A600 for
| PS199 or an A1200 for PS299 - all of them supposed entry-level
| machines. Very confusing for consumers.
|
| * It wasn't really fully software-compatible with the A500. In
| part because of the newer Kickstart, in part because of the lack
| of the A500's peculiar "slowfast" memory that many games took for
| granted, and in part because of the newer ECS chipset. The same
| problems afflicted the A500+, and meant that large amounts of
| already existing games just didn't work. This was the fault of
| the software houses, sure, but gamers looking for a good deal
| didn't care; they'd rather buy a second-hand A500 than gamble
| with an incompatible machine that offered no significant hardware
| upgrade.
|
| * People in the know who were on the market for an Amiga in 1993
| or 1994 probably bought an A1200.
| danby wrote:
| > * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200,
| which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for PS199, an
| A600 for PS199 or an A1200 for PS299 - all of them supposed
| entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
|
| If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed
| to compete with themselves.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| And nothing wrong with that if done correctly, but Commodore
| confused its customers.
| danby wrote:
| Having different products for different market segments is
| often a good idea. But in many cases Commodore released
| simultaneous products to compete for the same market
| segment.
| arexxbifs wrote:
| I honestly can't tell if it was stupid or genius of them, on
| a corporate level, to sell cheap PC:s that directly competed
| with Amigas in the home segment. On the one hand, they helped
| usher in the demise of their own cash cow. On the other hand,
| there was no shortage of competition from other home PC
| manufacturers.
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