Your dad is a legend Sam. I'm sure given his actual ownership of a professional repair shop in that time period, he wasn't responsible for the cosmetic damage to this model. As a consumer/amateur enthusiast I have encountered numerous laptops and consoles with similar and much worse damage from modern shops which i believe operate to a much lower standard. It's all or nothing really, modern repair shoos either no very little or or true electronics engineers capable of a full MB rebolling and full resolder of all chips. I've seen 360s and laptops pried apart without unfastening the clips in very amateur efforts. I don't believe shops were with poor in the early 90s.
@securitycountercheck indeed. I would say that, theoretically enlightened absolutism would be better. But, simply put, it's impossible. Leaving us with democracy, as said by Churchill, the worst form of Government except for all others.
@@bobbastian760 unfortunately not. Maybe it could have helped to pay for the A500 as it costed a small fortune here. Having said that Paraguay is far away from Colombia and South Brazil is not actually Brazil! ;)
Imagine if Commodore would have put at least an 68020 into the A600, and MAYBE even the AGA chipset, if not at least a variant of the ECS, with less compatibility issues and/or a regular VGA output, do get higher resolutions, and leverage the cheap PC monitors. But they were "too little, too late" with so many things. Well, I never had an Amiga as a kid, we started off with the PC, but now I own a 1987 German A500 and I will never let go of it. So much amazing games, and even more: the homebrew and demo scene is very much alive and kicking!
I ran 600s and 1200s but always preferred the footprint of the 600 on my desk. It was such a cute little thing. I still have it in my office along with a 1200 on display. I’ve owned hundreds of computers, repaired thousands, but have only loved four and the 600 and 1200 were two of those.
For me the AMIGA was always an aspirational machine. They were so sleek, cool, and ahead of their time! I never got the chance to own one, but I’m glad I can watch channels like this one and catch up on what I missed! Looking forward to Part 2!
Aww, nice to see my old Amiga getting some love and a great new home. :) I can tell you it was only ever repaired one time (I never opened it up myself), and that was to replace the disk drive. That repair shop no longer exists. And yeah, it was in Keighley. :D
@@RMCRetro Hey - I have no idea about the bulge. I don't remember ever even noticing it. :D Must be like you said - they put in the wrong screw and realised too late. Sticker was still intact so it didn't happen afterwards. :) I used to play all kinds of games, but mostly Monkey Island and other adventure games, and Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2. Still got 'em all actually. :D
Bit of trivia for you: without revealing my *exact* location, about 200,000 Amiga 600 units were built literally over the hill from my house: at a plant in Irvine, North Ayrshire, Scotland. Prior to the pandemic, a friend and I drove by the industrial estate all the time, and would try to guess which building might have contained the SCI Systems plant. (That said: my actual Amiga growing up was a Desktop Dynamite-era A1200, a model I've reacquired, had Polymer recapped, and fitted with both an ACA 1221 (for RAM/slight acceleration) and a 16GB CF card for WHDLoad fun)
The Love/Hate. Yeah, it's unusual, i've got 2 A600's now (one was mine from back in the day). The hate comes from the fact that the A600 was supposed to be a cost-reduced A500 and in the end was a little more expensive and only a tiny upgrade. So wasn't worth it. But if you didn't have an A500, it was a perfectly good and useable machine, and i loved the small form factor. The software incompatibilities (mentioned in the video for the A500+ and would have applied to the A600 as well) would have happened because developers were incorrectly calling directly into the kernal rom without going through the jump table, this meant that when the rom was changed, that old software didn't work. This wasn't commodore's fault, but just bad programming on the part of developers. And in a day when games didn't get patched, you were then just stuck with a game that would never work (I'm also not sure how many people were playing cracked games, and the cracked versions didn't work but the legit version would). So financially and strategically for Commodore, the A600 was a total massive miserable failture, from the point of view of looking at is as a computer, it's an amazing machine. Think of it this way, if the A500 never existed and the A600 had been the first wedge shaped Amiga, everyone would love it dearly to their heart. I do however think that adding an RF modulator was a step backwards, they could have cost reduced it by not adding that. Modulators were always going to go the way of the Dodo, so the A500 not having one was a good idea, you could add one if you needed it but eventually you would throw it away or the A500 could ship without it. The A600 could have shipped without and and users could have optinally bought an A520 get get TV support if they needed it. I seem to remember using composite and scart in the 90's on mine, the modulator looked like crap. I heard an interview with Dave Haynie, and he mentioned that the A600 started life as the A300 which was going to be some sort of video editing machine, maybe with the built in genlock, it would have stood alone as a new computer solving a specific problem. I think Commodore blunderingly repurposed it as an A500 replacement which nobody requested or needed, and hence more of the hate, i think they were just trying to prop the cashflow with a quick computer release instead of researching and creating new stuff, the sign of a company that is going down the toilet due to lack of innovation. So take it for what it is, the A600 is a great computer, but a computer that should have never existed, so unless you worked at Commodore at the time it was made, i don't think there is any reason to hate what it is.
So Dave Haynie also mentions in that video that the A1200 was supposed to come out before the A600, which would have made that magazine article shown here a different story. If that article had been about the new generation A1200, instead of "Oh, i've already got an Amiga that does all that", it would have been "Shut up and take my money" instead when read. What i had also forgotten util i re-listened to that interview, shortly after the release of the A500+, it was taken off sale in favour of the A600, which was bad, as the A600 (although a great computer), wasn't really a replacement for the A500+ at all (no numpad, no fast ram, and Dave mentions that there were no PCMCIA addon cards available at time of release). So another bad move on Commodore's part.
I do blame Commodore for Kickstart incompatibilities. It's not like Commodore didn't know that tons of programs were out there (ab)using the API the way they did. Telling your users "blame the devs, sucks to be you" is a terrible business decision. You will not sustain a large user base if you treat your users like that. Once something is widely used, it's a feature, whether you planned it or not. There's a reason why Microsoft and Linux are pretty anal about backwards compatibility.
One thing I think killed these Amigas 500plus and 600 was that compatible issue. I had a nice second hand German A500 with the memory and clock expansion. It came with about 1000 copied games. My mates got A500plus and 600,s later. I'd say about 20% of the games worked on them ,much to our dismay and annoyance.
I always loved the A600. It was portable, it could fit in any bag and be taken to your relatives or friends homes. MOST of the games I had worked fine either out of the box OR with Relokick and I never once assumed it was a "lower end" Amiga. I went from this to the A1200.
I went from an A500 to the A1200. A couple of friends bought the A600, but I was always a bit puzzled about the release of it as it was obviously not a real advancement from the A500, which was already quite old (though still a very popular computer in 1992). That said, I recognised its compact charm and smart bright finish which it shared with the A1200. Great that you could take it to your friend's houses, I doubt many people would have done that with an A500!
I recently DIY'ed the caps for the A1200 - really hoping you won't brutalize your pads by twisting them off with pliers, hot-air is difficult for the components around the area (plastic keyboard connector). I hope, upon reading this, you and others will consider doing what worked for me: *use TWO soldering irons!* It is by far the best way to go! Add a bit of solder and flux to each existing solder joint to loosen it up, then two soldering irons with conical tips on both sides of the cap, and they come clean off in 5-10 seconds. Life changer for me, was very nervous about breaking the A1200, huge relief to have tried this method, no risk at all of damaging anything, great piece of mind.. went from maximum stress to moment of zen. Hope I'm not too late.
I've recapped 2 A600's now and reapped my own 90's Amiga 600 this week. I did a video on the recapping. I'm using hot air (and i've recapped 2 A600's with zero damage now) . I did a video and i went through all the other techniques that are going about, I mentioned the 2 soldering iron technique but i didn't see anyone doing a video on that. My video is here th-cam.com/video/Rb77VOHj0WQ/w-d-xo.html
@@DavePoo2 Thanks I am enjoying your video right now. While I have hot air as an option (and use it for my some surface mounted components on my own (humble) designs) I decided against it due to the caps behind the keyboard connector, and the square delay line boxes on the left of the A1200; looking at your video, the A600 is similarly challenged when it comes to the caps near the audio. Glad you found something that works, hope you'll find an opportunity to give the twin iron approach a try, see if it works for you. Now I'll go hit play and continue watching your video.
@@DavePoo2 I haven't tried, but I don't like the idea about cap twisting. I desoldered the caps with the suction pump or copper braid and that worked fine. Flux is always very important. I know that the hot air as it seems avoids some problems that the soldering iron can produce if you are not so good with it.
I also hated the concept of the A600 when it was new. A pokey 68000 with 1MB RAM in 1992? Slow IDE instead of SCSI? No numpad? An incompatible PCMCIA slot instead of Zorro? And all of this for the same price as a full A500? No thanks! ...and yet, today, the ease of throwing an absurdly huge CF card on the IDE bus, adding a dirt cheap PCMCIA network card, and having a space saving design is extremely appealing compared to kitting out an A500 or A2000. Time has definitely changed my mind, and now I'm jealous of A600 owners...
I added an extra usb keyboard adapter to my A600. That way I can use a usb numpad with games that require a numpad. The keyboard controller in A600 automatically supports numpad, so all software works with external numpad without any modifications.
It's healthy to take a step back and reassess our dislike for the A600! As an original A500 owner back in 89, I can now seen the benefits of the 600 having that pesky, long A520 Modulator integrated, pretty good if you ask me. Also, I've just realised the A600 had 1mb Chip Ram total, right? So that's an upgrade from the 500's stock 512k (I spent a fortune - iirc around 1/3 the price of the A500 - adding the additional 512k RAM into the trapdoor). Also you didn't mention the relocated Joystick ports, which look more practical for hotswapping! I think we'd all be far more cool with it, if it had been called the A300 and come in at 249 gbp, at the same time/after the A1200. Keen to see the results on this project though Neil!
The A600 has always been the ugly duckling of the Amiga range. The Vampire was its sweet revenge. It’s so tiny and cute nowadays and that built in IDE port in hindsight is quite handy.
Another great video documentary from rmc! Enjoyed every second of it. I used to be the proud owner of an A600. I loved it way more than the a500. Compact, beautiful and functional.
I bought my A600 from my first pay cheque from ASDA in 1996. I was an Atari STe user before that. I never knew it was that old! All my friends had the A500. My A600 crashed all the time. It was only when I got a new kickstart disk and tried that out that it stopped crashing. Loved the machine (apart from the crashing)
Amiga 600, like it or loathe it? Vote now! And if you enjoyed this and would like to watch part 2 right now then head over the patreon.com/rmcretro where the Official Cave Dwellers enjoy 1 week of early access to all videos, ad-free. We're so close to the goal of 1000 patrons! Thank you for supporting the channel. Neil - RMC
I remember buying out an A600 from a friend in HS for cheap back in 1996, but back then my Sega Saturn was eating it for breakfast (and did not have a dedicated monitor for it, so playing it on the TV was also killing it). I still remember buying some Amiga magazine (one called Dream, that was then consolidating an audience from Amiga-only to every non-Windows bringing BeOS and other OSes) for it. I ended boxing it and ship to a cousin in Syria so he could enjoy a computer as it was beyond affordable there (through PCs started to implement slowly but surely, thanks to the huge counterfeit market of bootleg copies and the cost of burning CDs going down).
I was surprised by the fact that this is the rev 2D [the last] and not the early rev 1.0 or 1.1 [Aka A300]. This is because the PCMCIA slot vent edges in your case are of a tighter size-fit compared to other revisions. If you check other A600 cases, you will see that PCMCIA slots vents are of equal rectangular size [exact like those found on the A1200s]. Another thing to be aware of and to take note for those who are gonna disassemble for the first time is that the A600 case has the fragile clips on the back, where in this video it clearly shows that you had not struggle to detach the bottom part from the upper part of the case, that should mean they are already broken from the previous repairer[s]. My A600 upgrades include the ACA620EC accelerator board and an inbuilt GoTek drive, great for WHDload and also is the Amiga which I use for many events due to portability :) Keep it up Neil, eagerly waiting for part 2 :)
As the 600 was my first, and only Amiga, I may love it more than most! There was some kind of work around for the numeric keypad, as one of my favourite PD games used it...however I have no idea what it was now!
Finally found a video worth watching.. just watched someone try and sell me a small oled monitor for £650 and another video for a video camera that £6000......I am so grateful for this video.
My A600 has a vampire in it, BUT before I bought that I ran it at stock speeds with 1mb Trapdoor and 9.5mb CPU piggy back expansion and honestly for "most" WHDload games it was fine. Running a pre-built Workbench install I used it for playing games, listening to mods and just faffing around with and loved every minute of it.
Love the channel, always a pleasure to watch. I picked up a refurbished A600 recently and it's laptop size form factor is useful when including it on a desk with other computers. A Gotek drive with external LED display is also useful. The frustrating thing I have found, but this is common to other computers of this age is the keyboard. Getting the keyboard to function consistently is difficult. The Amiga community is great for obtaining updated keyboard springs and keyboard membranes but the plungers with the rubber contacts deteriorate with age. I have improved the conductive nature of the plungers using KeyPad fix but still find 3 keys only work when pressed at certain angles. Repeatedly removing and reassembling the keyboard will also drive you nuts!
@@laserwave6012 I do have one and I agree they are very good. I think the issue is with the plungers themselves, unfortunately they are the only part of the keyboard you cannot buy new :-)
If your only using the A600 for games it’s a great machine (unless you want to play certain flight sims 😀). The small form factor allows you to slide it into your setup with ease. Back in the day I would pop it in my back pack and take it round my mates house to play Lotus 2 with a null modem cable which we went halves on from Tandy.
I remember the warnings of peers, not to get an A500+, nor an A600 because of the incompatibility issues. We were too poor for any of those machines, but my brother got an A500 from one of his friends in the 2000s in some kind of trading. Including the awesome stereo Commodore monitor. Today, I‘d love owning an A600.
i love the a600, the issue back then was price, but i think it was worth it for the form factor. :) the amiga sure held its price over the decades. love the video's and all things amiga. i added a furia but the it didn't work on the june bug, but did work on the older model. not sure why because they both work fine.
The 600 was my entry into Amiga ownership, so I didn’t have the same view as an existing A500 owner would have had. I very quickly added a 122Mb hard drive which transformed the machine, and I used it for many years very happily. The fact that it looks great in the small footprint and white case means in the modern day, it’s a perfect “classic” Amiga, giving you access to pretty much all of the standard library of games without taking up all the desk space! I still think it’s a great looking machine, and if taken out of context of its launch period, makes great sense to retro gamers now 👍
Excellent introduction to the A600. Back in the day, they were pretty worthless, especially to us in America who had probably already expanded the daylights out of our A2000's and A500's, or were eyeing the A3000. In 2020 I would love to have one though, as the compact size makes them very adorable. They are still pretty limited as far as expandability due to the PCMCA slot not really working well with more than four megabytes of RAM, but you can overcome that by sticking a vampire in there.
I had an A600 with a 1MB RAM upgrade and a 128 MB hard drive. I remember playing Monkey Island 2 on it having a great time while my friends juggled their 11 floppies to travel between the islands on their old pleb A500s. Also had a Kickstart 1.3 software solution installed on the hard drive so I could play the games that didn’t like the ECS chipset. No numeric keypad? No problem... I installed a program that could remap the keys to unused keys on the keyboard. Loved my A600.
I always enjoy watching your Amiga content. I was the odd kid in the US that had a video toaster equipped Amiga 2500 while everyone else had IBM PC compatibles. When I switched to a PC in the 90s my parents donated my Amiga. I was sad then and years later I still am.
I’ve converted an old, empty Amiga 600 case into a MiSTer machine using a guide I found online and some 3D printed parts from eBay. It works brilliantly with the Minimig FPGA core and looks really neat, using the integrated keyboard through a Keyrah adapter card.
A bit unrelated, but ive just realised that SAAB's Trionic 5 engine management system released in early 1993 was more powerful than the A600. It had a Motorola 6800 running at 20Mhz, and 2MB of RAM. And 512kb of Storage. It was at the time, the most powerful and advanced engine management system in the world.
6800 or 68000? Makes several bits of a difference :) Anyways, in 1993 the 68k was already tremendously old news (introduced in 1979!). I mean the 68030 was already out in 1987, 68040 in 1991. back then those were very long years too as tech went forward rapidly. I guess Motorola never got their manufacturing process up to speed to make the chips cheaply enough. Or some government military program ate up all the production capacity. Who knows.
It seems that all these years I was under in the wrong impression that the A600 was a cut down version of the A1200. I never owned a A600, I had a A1200, which was gifted to me for my 18th birthday, and I had not been into the Amiga scene before that, later seeing the A600, assuming in was a cut down version of the A1200, given it looked almost the same, just without the 10 key pad.
I totally understand why you don't like the machine but to me it's a 500 in a slim, lightweight case that looks phenomenal. For someone who has problems lifting things (health issues) A600 is best 'cause I can carry it around with ease.
My Amiga 600 was my first Amiga, so I have a lot of love for it. I got it when I was 13, having saved up my paper round money for *months* - remember the thrill of going into Dixons in Sheffield and finally getting this machine I'd wanted for soooo long, along with the Wild, Weird and Wicked pack (and a joystick that Dixons threw in for free). I didn't know (or care) about the controversies that surrounded the 600 - I was just so glad to finally have an Amiga (though I did spot an A1200 in another shop window and tried to persuade my parents that I should buy that as it was the same price, but better; however, that didn't come with any games so that didn't work). And it lasted me a good decade, most of that time with 1 floppy drive and 2 megs of RAM - wrote all my school and uni essays on it, including my dissertation! But I can see now why it was disliked, although that doesn't change my opinion of the machine. I think if you were new to the Amiga it wasn't a bad entry point, but I can see that if you had an A500/+ then it didn't offer much in the way of reasons to upgrade. I do wish I'd saved up afterwards for an Amiga 1200, though!
I didn't have an Amiga 600, but my brother and I loved our A500. I took it to University too. I used it for all my school assignments, games and I went on some local BBSs too. We had 1 meg of RAM and one external floppy. We enjoyed so many great games on it! It was an amazing Chritmas present for us.
So, things that I like about the A600 for modern use over an A500. It’s more portable with a vga to 23 pin adaptor plug in, memory exp for chip and fast ram installed and wireless networking PCMCIA card (more on that in a moment) in the slot and everything you want is in the unit. So it is lug around or pull out of cupboard as the case maybe. You can even add a pretty decent accelerator if you want to. Networking isn’t so easy and cheep on other Amigas other than A600 and A1200, I have brought a couple of networking PCMCIA cards an ethernet card and wireless card 802.11 card. So that is why I like the A600 more now than I did in the day. Ben
I loved my A600 back in the day - for someone purchasing a new Amiga in 1993, it looks sleeker and sexier than the old lump A500, and wasn't as expensive as the A1200. In retrospect I should have upgraded it with a hard drive though, but those weren't cheap in 1993 and opening up a machine was an alien world for me back then - getting one from the store would have bumped the price up by 50% for a 64Mb drive! The upgrades you've gone for pretty much reflect what I have for my modern day A600, although I substituted the Wicher for a static RAM PCMCIA card, which gives me an extra 2Mb. I'd heard a few stories of the over-chip upgrades popping off unceremoniously, so I decided to steer clear at the time. 4Mb total RAM runs most WHDLoad stuff. I also upgraded the mouse and joystick but I suspect you might have one or two Monster Joysticks sitting around :) The only other consideration is connecting to a monitor. I picked up an RGB to SCART lead, and then upscaled it into the VGA socket on a 15Hz compliant monitor. There are options for RGB to VGA I believe, but I have the option to go straight into a TV too with this setup. Looking forward to the next video! You treat that A600 right! :D
The A600 was my gateway into desktop computing/gaming, I absolutely loved it. Growing up in a low income household, I never expected to have my own computer, just hand me down consoles from extended family. But, in 1994 my parents were able to scrape together enough money to buy me a 2nd hand A600 for Christmas. Christmas morning arrives and i was left dumbfounded to find what was lurking beneath that awful wrapping paper, my very own Amiga (Bundled with the most ghetto, cobbled together "game pack" the computer shop had thrown together i might add) Sure, it wasn't the shiny, brand spanking new A1200 my cousin had received for his birthday earlier that year but this A600 was MINE and it opened me up to a whole world that i had never seen before. I was particularly enamoured by the demo scene and cracktros, going as far as to get more excited for a new cracked game just to see the latest intro/music/greetz and bbs info.
@@RMCRetro This is an excellent joke and I don't want to diminish it in any way. However this being a nerd channel, I was just about to comment a correction about the capacitor plague. The plague was a late-90's phenomenon and hadn't started when Amigas were being made. The caps in the Amiga era were mostly well made and if they're failing now it's from graceful old age rather than stolen (and broken) electrolyte recipes.
Another great video, thanks Neil. I have never owned an Amiga, and probably never will due to the cost, but still really enjoy watching the restoration and upgrade videos.
I had an A500+ with the HD8 hard disk with 8Mb of RAM. I LOVED that machine. I also had an A600 with 60Mb HDD. I think I've still got them both round my partners folks mouldering away in a shed somewhere. Neil, you've inspired me to try and dig them out. :)
Loved my Amiga 500 back in the early 90s. I remember swapping out the ROM to use the newer Workbench 2.1. Then I bought a sidecar expansion that held a 105 MB IDE drive and had 8 RAM slots that I eventually filled. I bought 1 x 1MB SIMM every paycheque. I remember each 1 MB SIMM was $100. This Amiga served me fine until I upgraded to an Amiga 4000 when it was released. I bought an Emplant Mac emulator board for the A4000 and had a faster colour Mac than my real Mac owner friends did. They spent $5000, I spent $500 for the board. I think I had a 2400 baud modem with my A500 and eventually got a 14 400 baud with my A4000. Great times. Sadly, I sold my A4000 around 1995 or 1996 and bought the parts to make my first Windows PC. What a step backwards that was in terms of multimedia.
I miss the days when I would wait all month for my Amiga Format to hit the door mat. I'd pour over those pages and read it over and over... until next month's issue arrived.
Thankfully the A1200 was out at more or less the same time which did of course offer significant upgrades over the A500. Shame it didn't come out a year or so earlier though as it was just really catching up with PCs instead of overtaking.
True, though by coming on the market so soon after the A600, the A1200 made the A600 look even worse. It launched for roughly the same price as the A600, with twice the amount of RAM, AGA chipset, numeric keypad and easier expandability via the trapdoor slot.
I wrote about this elsewhere, but Commodore made such a mess with that product launch. A A1200 launch in May 1992 (to allow time for any revisions needed before the Christmas rush) combined with a low-profile cheap A300 (not A600!) a couple of months later would have given Amiga an incredibly powerful range for Christmas 92. They then would have had around 2 years from the launch of the A1200 to get a Hombre-based product onto the market. A Hombre-based console would have been a huge winner at Christmas 94, and they could have created a backwards-compatible A-something to sell to people who wanted a proper computer a few months later. At that point, Commodore would have had a very strong lineup - a bargain basement A300 for those wanting a cheap home computer, the A1200 for those wanting something tried, tested and functional, the Hombre Console for those wanting state-of-the-art gaming, and the Hombre Computer for those wanting the best of both worlds, and all this before the PS1 launched in North America/Europe. There was still demand in 1994-5 for cheap home computers, and the A300/A1200 would have done nicely. The PC would have fought back with Windows 95, but the profits from Hombre alone would have probably been enough to position Commodore in a move towards console gaming. In their place, I would have ditched the home computer stuff (support it, but don't bother releasing something new) and focused on a Hombre Console II to come out by Christmas 1998. Commodore were always going to lose the home computer war once Windows 95 came out, but they had the console market with their technology if they wanted it.
As a kid, I saw a 600 complete with joysticks, printer and dozens of floppies on a flea market. The only reason mom couldn't buy it for me is the transport because she had no car. I still think the 600 is a nice game machine.
@Daniel Johnson I just mean in general. Many people are quick to trash the A600. Even back in the day, smaller form factor with built in IDE controller...win win for me.
For me, I can't play Dungeon Master with the keyboard making A600 rubbish. I installed a keyrah in mine too use a ps2 keyboard, but then it's bigger than an A500, defeating the purpose of its size.
@@cbmeeks In the five years between 87 and 92 the PC market has leaped forward, and the A600 was more expensive and had an IDE. As much of an Amiga fan I’ve been over the years, it didn’t progress nearly fast enough to have been able to survive in term:(
I always loved the look of the A600, a friend got one and I did often admire it sat there in his room all sleek and compact but yeah, likewise I’d had my A500+ a year by then so there was never any need to actually own one. I too drifted away to the glamour of a PC.. because you know, Doom.
I had one of those GVP HD8+ units. It transformed my miggy into such a great machine. Brilliant bit of kit. I saw one in Oz last year on ebay for about £500! The A600 was a poor step for C=, but I've two of them now, one with a Vampire and I NOW love them.
The Amiga 600 is a cute little machine. Back then before the AGA / A600 release, my computer was an Amiga 1000 with 2MB RAM, 25MB HD, De-interlacer add-on and a 14Mhz 68000 accelerator, the A600 was a downgrade as I didn’t want another keyboard-computer. When the A4000 came out, I went to the store to check it out. First, I didn’t care for their new white and brown color for the case. I considered an A1200 as a possibility as Commodore was stupid to NOT make a low-end Amiga a detached keyboard. Imagine that, If they made an “Amiga 1400” for $200 more (An A1200 in a pizza box form factor) I would have considered it, room for a 3.5” HD and use an A4000 keyboard. The AGA Amigas requires a SPECIAL monitor to display both interlace and de-interlace modes. Games required interlace. The deinterlacer was SUBSTANDARD compared to the A3000 and even the A1000 add-on. It had a stripe effect. ITS NOT PROFESSIONAL. With that, I did NOT want ANY Amiga AGA and besides, C= put me in a bind. I didn’t want to spend $600 for the A1200 + $300 for the C= monitor for a keyboard-computer The 68030 version of the A4000 was around $2500, out of my budget. Oh, and the A4000 was uglier than the A2000. At that point, I knew C= was going to die. So many stupid business decisions. So, I bought a brand new A3000 (68030/25Mhz) for $800. I was already running AmigaOS3.0 on my Amiga 1000 running in 8 color desktop mode. If commodore wasn’t so stupid, they would have destroyed Apple/Mac and likely make a good dent in the PC market.
The A600 was my first and only Amiga until I bought a CD32 last year. I thought it was a cracking little machine and it was the Another World advert that sold it to me. I’m glad I still have it but it’s at my parents house. Definitely on the list for a refurb and will be looking forward to the next set of videos. Currently recapping the CD32 and SMD caps are not my favourite right now. Great video Neil. Keep them coming!
I'm of the mindset to expand the capability of any computer I get ahold of, from doing the maximum compatible RAM upgrade to anything else which enables the computer to do more than its original specs.
Makes sense, though I think it's way too easy to take that too far, and in a sense it kind of defeats the purpose of buying an old machine. Like you could take an old Amiga and throw a few hundred dollars at it and get an FPGA processor like the Vampire, hundreds of MB of RAM, and a huge solid-state hard drive, scan doubler, HDMI output, etc... The result would be more powerful than any vintage Amiga - and in a sense not quite an Amiga any more. Also a total waste in any practical sense, as the machine would still be inferior to $50 worth of Raspberry Pi. Personally, all that said, I am interested in adding modern upgrades to my old Amiga - really in my case the only thing holding me back is that I never had an Amiga before, and want to experience the machine as it is before I start changing it too radically.
ahhhh yes - the good ol Amiga Format mags, this was when we had no internet and had to wait for the latest and greatest...and when the mags came out it was worth the wait. Sometimes waiting just makes things so much better.
The Amiga 600 was the first Amiga that I ever had, and it sparked a life-long love for the platform. It was also the second Amiga that I ever had, after the floppy drive stopped working on the first and I got rid of it, and picked up the second in around 1998 for £3, and sadly that one lasted about a month before I accidentally stood on it in the middle of the night. I never had any issues with software compatibility (legally owned software, that is - there were some less than legal copies of games that I had that wouldn't work but that's different: all legal software I got worked fine). Nice little machine, still love them.
I had a VIC 20, my first computer, and used it happily for a couple of years. But it went out of production and I was not happy about that. So I bought a C128 and prepared myself to be wowed by it. I can count the number of times I booted up in 128 mode on one hand. Then it too went out of production. Buy myself an Amiga? After having been burned twice by CBM? Nope. I went over to the pc side. I did though, stay partially loyal to Commodore--my first pc was a Colt. I used it for several years and sold it to someone. Commodore is just a memory to me now.
Great video! I bought my first PC in 1991 after being a die hard Amiga fan for years. The Amiga 500 was such a revolution when it came out. All my friends had Commodore 64, 128 or ZX Spectrums, but I never understood the appeal. I thought they sucked and I spend my money at the local arcade instead where sound and graphics were in a different league. Then the A500 came and I instantly became a computer enthusiast. But it was slow, and when it couldn't keep up with Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon I upgraded to a 386 PC and haven't used an Amiga ever since. I do look forward to the A500 mini though to play some classics and hopefully it will be able to play some demos which was the coolest thing about the Amiga scene if you aske me.
Really enjoying your videos. Ahhh the Amiga 600. My most hated machine in the Amiga line of computers. Back in the 90's i had an Amiga 500. When the time came to upgrade to a better Amiga, i had 2 options in my price range when i visited an Amiga dealer. There was a used A2500 in top condition. It had an 030 card, hard drive and some extra fast ram inside. The other option was a brand new A600 without a hard drive. I went with the A600 and dreaded the decision pretty much the first day i got it home. I was a huge demo fan so thats the first thing i tried. I was disappointed that a lot of the demos i enjoyed watching on me A500 did not work on the A600. I spoke to the guys at the Amiga store and they suggested that i needed a rom swapper with Kickstart 1.3 as thats what my A500 had, so i bought the rom swapper and a kickstart 1.3 chip. I also bought 1mb extra ram for the trap door as i needed it for some of the larger animations i wanted to watch. As soon as i got home, i began fitting the rom swapper and extra ram. I eagerly boot the A600 with kickstart 1.3 and insert one the demo that would not run. To my surprise, after forking out extra money i really could have used on other things, the demo still did not run. I founf out later that some of the demos needed slow ram. I only kept the A600 for a few months before trading the whole lot for just $120au at cash converters cause i was so disappointed with the machine. I ended up getting another A500 and later moved to an A1200. Since then up to a few years ago, i have revisited the A600 on 3 occasions thinking my experience with it will be different. On all 3 occasions i ended up selling the thing in disappointment. A lot of people tell me, "you should have kept it and used it as whdload machine" but if you where a big fan of Amiga demo's and used your Amiga as a main computer for all of the 90's like myself, you would know that what is available on whdload is probably only a quarter (if that) of the Amiga software available. Not sure if i read correct a while ago, not sure if whdload software will run on a 68000 CPU. I read it needs a 68010 or above. I could be wrong though?? Hope the A600 does you well in the end of all this. Cheers
A500 was my love, installed some (1Mb fast) memory on the actual motherboard, had a huge 8MB in the expansion slot, 28MHz accelerator, plus a 100Mb hard drive, which had a 2Mb of memory expansion. And of course the kickstar switcher, 1.3 or 2.04, and perhaps there was ECS also. Good times.
I never had an A600 back in the day but I have one now and it's an awesome machine. A1200 prices are crazy and getting crazier by the minute. The A600 is a nice compromise and looks sweet in a Plexilaser case if that's your bag. Another top vid Neil. 👍
The A600 was my first Amiga back in 1992, best Christmas present ever! I can see how it would have been a disappointment to A500 owners waiting for an upgraded machine. Although a neat system the A600 didn't offer enough to get people to upgrade. Commodore probably should have just focused a getting the A1200 out sooner, most people who bought the A600 probably would have just bought an A1200 instead given the pricing and Commodore might not have lost disappointed users, like Neil, to other platforms.
Great Video as always. I do also have to admit the same as the comment below however... - Myself, as well the majority of the people who I knew with Amigas back in the day, were genuinely under the impression that the A600 was a new machine and the lessor, cut down machine version of the A1200 - given that 600 is half of 1200, same colour and design, albeit smaller etc. A clever play by whoever decided on the A600 name to make a lot of people think this
Many A600s didn't have the top shielding installed from the factory. I had 2 A600s and both had leaked capacitors. In one, this led to the complete breakdown of the PCB paths around the audio filters. Nevertheless, I still like the A600, for its compact form factor (it is about the same size as Atari 65XE, and it fits into my laptop bag, together with a laptop). My upgrades consist of a CF-IDE adapter, Kickstart 3.1, 1MB Chip RAM expansion + RTC, and a 4MB Fast RAM expansion. I really regret, choosing another expansion than Wicher 608 :( I have SukkoPera's Open Amiga 600 Fast Ram Expansion, which is more expensive, and only 4MB. The PCMCIA card won't work with 8MB Fast RAM board. I have 4MB, but had no luck with finding a working adapter/card combination. P.S. "Wicher" is supposed to be spelled as "vi-her", and its name means "a gale".
I thought the form factor was great as the original a500 was just way too big to fit in my desk lol. Shame they didn't upgrade the clock speed then at least a500 owners would of had a reason to swap to this . The price was too high too as said in the video it needed to be cheaper not more expensive
The most frustrating computer-buying decision I ever experienced was the 600. My family bought one about 6 months before the 1200 was announced, so what we had was basically obsolete almost instantly.
Wow. In late '90, I bought my first PC for around £500 equivalent. No multimedia, but a 25 MHz 386 with a 40 MB hd. That included a 1024x768 monitor. It's unbelievable that anyone at Commodore thought the A600 was a good idea.
Great video Neil, I really hope you start to fall in love with the mini miggy over the following episodes! I use an A600 as my "daily" and I absolutely love its upgrade-ability and compact size. I run a Furia with PCMCIA card, Plipbox and Null modem transfer cable (because you can never have enough ways to send stuff to your Amiga!) One simple upgrade you didn't mention but have probably already considered is a video/scart lead. Approx £15 of ebay. Thanks for the PSU link BTW. Will take a look. Good luck with the upgrades, those surface mounted caps can be an arse! Cheers
I can't resist these Amiga videos. The memories flood back and I learn something from every video I watch on this and other channels. Its funny how I really disliked this model but today I can't help but see how charming it is.
This was my first amiga which I got in my christmas stocking in 92. I have very font memories of this one and kitted it out with a 40mb hard-disk and cd-rom drive via the PCMCIA slot. Lets just say, the specs and the other cost reductions convinced me by 1993 to upgrade to an accelerated A1200.
While I myself have been using an Amiga 2000 and then an Amiga 3000 I really liked the Amiga 600. They were sold out at amazingly low prices. My whole family -uncle, brother, cousin, father bought Amiga 600 for prices around 150-200DM ~ $100-$150. And why not, it was a reasonable complete system after you installed a used hard drive for another $20. It was good enough for Small Office Home Office, good enough to connect to Fidonet, Usenet and the early 1990 Internet. And it had a ton of nice games available cheaply. Most of my family kept using it until XP on Ghz systems which as at least eight years. In my oppinion there was never again such a complete system for such a low price until the Pi 400. Btw, instead of a PCMCIA-memory-card I would have installed a PCMCIA ethernet solution. It works great and is of a lot more use than an SD card.
I recently got my first Amiga, and looked more or less the same way at the A600 and even A1200. While I like the capabilities of the later models, they represent a point where the Amiga was clearly falling behind expectations, while the A500 was the one I marveled at when I saw it in the shop... By the time the A600 came out I was saving all my pennies to buy my first PC, dreaming of Wing Commander and X-Wing. To me the great thing about the PCMCIA slot is it makes it fairly inexpensive to add good network hardware to the machine. If anything, that and the compact size are what would have pushed me toward the A600 instead of the A500 I got. The machine I got is kind of a compromise - rev 5 NTSC and missing a lot of accessories (and I carelessly overpaid for it), but that's turned it into a bit of a project and I think that will ultimately make it more fun.
Thanks Iain, yeah this series is basically T2T except the A600 isn't really in bad enough condition to consider it trash cosmetically. Glad you're enjoying it!
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
It was my dad who repaired it, BM was for Bob Moorehouse & he had a computer shop in Keighley where he did the repairs
Lol I came to say that phone numbers keighley .. I remember Bob too :) 😃
He did bad repairs and was always drunk on the job.
Lol just kidding. Never met the man... Isnt the Internet awesome?
Bob moorehouse sounds like bob monkhouse. Remember him.. He had a like a permanent s eating grin. Member? Member?
I member.
@@sammymcfone8281 You don't sound quite right in the head, boy!
Your dad is a legend Sam.
I'm sure given his actual ownership of a professional repair shop in that time period, he wasn't responsible for the cosmetic damage to this model.
As a consumer/amateur enthusiast I have encountered numerous laptops and consoles with similar and much worse damage from modern shops which i believe operate to a much lower standard.
It's all or nothing really, modern repair shoos either no very little or or true electronics engineers capable of a full MB rebolling and full resolder of all chips.
I've seen 360s and laptops pried apart without unfastening the clips in very amateur efforts.
I don't believe shops were with poor in the early 90s.
AMIGA = local craftsman & global delivery ! Bought my first A500, back in 1989, in Brazil, smuggled through Paraguay
@securitycountercheck indeed. I would say that, theoretically enlightened absolutism would be better. But, simply put, it's impossible. Leaving us with democracy, as said by Churchill, the worst form of Government except for all others.
Did you hide it in 100 kilos of colombia white or what? 😂
@@bobbastian760 unfortunately not. Maybe it could have helped to pay for the A500 as it costed a small fortune here. Having said that Paraguay is far away from Colombia and South Brazil is not actually Brazil! ;)
Imagine if Commodore would have put at least an 68020 into the A600, and MAYBE even the AGA chipset, if not at least a variant of the ECS, with less compatibility issues and/or a regular VGA output, do get higher resolutions, and leverage the cheap PC monitors. But they were "too little, too late" with so many things. Well, I never had an Amiga as a kid, we started off with the PC, but now I own a 1987 German A500 and I will never let go of it. So much amazing games, and even more: the homebrew and demo scene is very much alive and kicking!
I ran 600s and 1200s but always preferred the footprint of the 600 on my desk. It was such a cute little thing. I still have it in my office along with a 1200 on display.
I’ve owned hundreds of computers, repaired thousands, but have only loved four and the 600 and 1200 were two of those.
For me the AMIGA was always an aspirational machine. They were so sleek, cool, and ahead of their time! I never got the chance to own one, but I’m glad I can watch channels like this one and catch up on what I missed! Looking forward to Part 2!
Aww, nice to see my old Amiga getting some love and a great new home. :) I can tell you it was only ever repaired one time (I never opened it up myself), and that was to replace the disk drive. That repair shop no longer exists. And yeah, it was in Keighley. :D
Oh hey! Great to see you here! Do you have any idea about where the screw bulge came from? Also what did you use it for/play on it most?
@@RMCRetro Hey - I have no idea about the bulge. I don't remember ever even noticing it. :D Must be like you said - they put in the wrong screw and realised too late. Sticker was still intact so it didn't happen afterwards. :) I used to play all kinds of games, but mostly Monkey Island and other adventure games, and Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter 2. Still got 'em all actually. :D
It was my first and only Amiga! How can you not love it for that! :)
I loved it!
mine too, i still have mine and still love it like i did the day i received it on my 12th birthday back in '92
And me! Later upgraded to an A1200. Luved em both.
Bit of trivia for you: without revealing my *exact* location, about 200,000 Amiga 600 units were built literally over the hill from my house: at a plant in Irvine, North Ayrshire, Scotland. Prior to the pandemic, a friend and I drove by the industrial estate all the time, and would try to guess which building might have contained the SCI Systems plant.
(That said: my actual Amiga growing up was a Desktop Dynamite-era A1200, a model I've reacquired, had Polymer recapped, and fitted with both an ACA 1221 (for RAM/slight acceleration) and a 16GB CF card for WHDLoad fun)
Sounds like a slightly less whimsical Charlie and Chocolate Factory, minus the chocolate and Charlie.
The Love/Hate. Yeah, it's unusual, i've got 2 A600's now (one was mine from back in the day). The hate comes from the fact that the A600 was supposed to be a cost-reduced A500 and in the end was a little more expensive and only a tiny upgrade. So wasn't worth it. But if you didn't have an A500, it was a perfectly good and useable machine, and i loved the small form factor. The software incompatibilities (mentioned in the video for the A500+ and would have applied to the A600 as well) would have happened because developers were incorrectly calling directly into the kernal rom without going through the jump table, this meant that when the rom was changed, that old software didn't work. This wasn't commodore's fault, but just bad programming on the part of developers. And in a day when games didn't get patched, you were then just stuck with a game that would never work (I'm also not sure how many people were playing cracked games, and the cracked versions didn't work but the legit version would).
So financially and strategically for Commodore, the A600 was a total massive miserable failture, from the point of view of looking at is as a computer, it's an amazing machine. Think of it this way, if the A500 never existed and the A600 had been the first wedge shaped Amiga, everyone would love it dearly to their heart.
I do however think that adding an RF modulator was a step backwards, they could have cost reduced it by not adding that. Modulators were always going to go the way of the Dodo, so the A500 not having one was a good idea, you could add one if you needed it but eventually you would throw it away or the A500 could ship without it. The A600 could have shipped without and and users could have optinally bought an A520 get get TV support if they needed it. I seem to remember using composite and scart in the 90's on mine, the modulator looked like crap.
I heard an interview with Dave Haynie, and he mentioned that the A600 started life as the A300 which was going to be some sort of video editing machine, maybe with the built in genlock, it would have stood alone as a new computer solving a specific problem. I think Commodore blunderingly repurposed it as an A500 replacement which nobody requested or needed, and hence more of the hate, i think they were just trying to prop the cashflow with a quick computer release instead of researching and creating new stuff, the sign of a company that is going down the toilet due to lack of innovation.
So take it for what it is, the A600 is a great computer, but a computer that should have never existed, so unless you worked at Commodore at the time it was made, i don't think there is any reason to hate what it is.
th-cam.com/video/aZV-b8uwg4Q/w-d-xo.html - Here is the link with the quote from Dave Haynie about the A300 with the genlock.
So Dave Haynie also mentions in that video that the A1200 was supposed to come out before the A600, which would have made that magazine article shown here a different story. If that article had been about the new generation A1200, instead of "Oh, i've already got an Amiga that does all that", it would have been "Shut up and take my money" instead when read.
What i had also forgotten util i re-listened to that interview, shortly after the release of the A500+, it was taken off sale in favour of the A600, which was bad, as the A600 (although a great computer), wasn't really a replacement for the A500+ at all (no numpad, no fast ram, and Dave mentions that there were no PCMCIA addon cards available at time of release). So another bad move on Commodore's part.
I do blame Commodore for Kickstart incompatibilities. It's not like Commodore didn't know that tons of programs were out there (ab)using the API the way they did. Telling your users "blame the devs, sucks to be you" is a terrible business decision. You will not sustain a large user base if you treat your users like that. Once something is widely used, it's a feature, whether you planned it or not. There's a reason why Microsoft and Linux are pretty anal about backwards compatibility.
One thing I think killed these Amigas 500plus and 600 was that compatible issue.
I had a nice second hand German A500 with the memory and clock expansion. It came with about 1000 copied games. My mates got A500plus and 600,s later.
I'd say about 20% of the games worked on them ,much to our dismay and annoyance.
I always loved the A600. It was portable, it could fit in any bag and be taken to your relatives or friends homes. MOST of the games I had worked fine either out of the box OR with Relokick and I never once assumed it was a "lower end" Amiga.
I went from this to the A1200.
I went from an A500 to the A1200. A couple of friends bought the A600, but I was always a bit puzzled about the release of it as it was obviously not a real advancement from the A500, which was already quite old (though still a very popular computer in 1992). That said, I recognised its compact charm and smart bright finish which it shared with the A1200. Great that you could take it to your friend's houses, I doubt many people would have done that with an A500!
I recently DIY'ed the caps for the A1200 - really hoping you won't brutalize your pads by twisting them off with pliers, hot-air is difficult for the components around the area (plastic keyboard connector). I hope, upon reading this, you and others will consider doing what worked for me:
*use TWO soldering irons!*
It is by far the best way to go! Add a bit of solder and flux to each existing solder joint to loosen it up, then two soldering irons with conical tips on both sides of the cap, and they come clean off in 5-10 seconds. Life changer for me, was very nervous about breaking the A1200, huge relief to have tried this method, no risk at all of damaging anything, great piece of mind.. went from maximum stress to moment of zen. Hope I'm not too late.
I've recapped 2 A600's now and reapped my own 90's Amiga 600 this week. I did a video on the recapping. I'm using hot air (and i've recapped 2 A600's with zero damage now) . I did a video and i went through all the other techniques that are going about, I mentioned the 2 soldering iron technique but i didn't see anyone doing a video on that. My video is here th-cam.com/video/Rb77VOHj0WQ/w-d-xo.html
People are so angry about cap twisting 😂
@@DavePoo2 Thanks I am enjoying your video right now. While I have hot air as an option (and use it for my some surface mounted components on my own (humble) designs) I decided against it due to the caps behind the keyboard connector, and the square delay line boxes on the left of the A1200; looking at your video, the A600 is similarly challenged when it comes to the caps near the audio. Glad you found something that works, hope you'll find an opportunity to give the twin iron approach a try, see if it works for you. Now I'll go hit play and continue watching your video.
@@DavePoo2 I haven't tried, but I don't like the idea about cap twisting. I desoldered the caps with the suction pump or copper braid and that worked fine. Flux is always very important. I know that the hot air as it seems avoids some problems that the soldering iron can produce if you are not so good with it.
Why not use soldering tweezers?
I also hated the concept of the A600 when it was new. A pokey 68000 with 1MB RAM in 1992? Slow IDE instead of SCSI? No numpad? An incompatible PCMCIA slot instead of Zorro? And all of this for the same price as a full A500? No thanks! ...and yet, today, the ease of throwing an absurdly huge CF card on the IDE bus, adding a dirt cheap PCMCIA network card, and having a space saving design is extremely appealing compared to kitting out an A500 or A2000. Time has definitely changed my mind, and now I'm jealous of A600 owners...
I added an extra usb keyboard adapter to my A600. That way I can use a usb numpad with games that require a numpad. The keyboard controller in A600 automatically supports numpad, so all software works with external numpad without any modifications.
THIS is great information and changes my attitude towards the 600.
It's healthy to take a step back and reassess our dislike for the A600!
As an original A500 owner back in 89, I can now seen the benefits of the 600 having that pesky, long A520 Modulator integrated, pretty good if you ask me. Also, I've just realised the A600 had 1mb Chip Ram total, right? So that's an upgrade from the 500's stock 512k (I spent a fortune - iirc around 1/3 the price of the A500 - adding the additional 512k RAM into the trapdoor).
Also you didn't mention the relocated Joystick ports, which look more practical for hotswapping!
I think we'd all be far more cool with it, if it had been called the A300 and come in at 249 gbp, at the same time/after the A1200.
Keen to see the results on this project though Neil!
The A600 has always been the ugly duckling of the Amiga range. The Vampire was its sweet revenge. It’s so tiny and cute nowadays and that built in IDE port in hindsight is quite handy.
Another great video documentary from rmc! Enjoyed every second of it. I used to be the proud owner of an A600. I loved it way more than the a500. Compact, beautiful and functional.
I bought my A600 from my first pay cheque from ASDA in 1996. I was an Atari STe user before that. I never knew it was that old! All my friends had the A500. My A600 crashed all the time. It was only when I got a new kickstart disk and tried that out that it stopped crashing. Loved the machine (apart from the crashing)
Ohh, the hours i spent playing sensible soccer on this one!!!!
and cannon fodder
@Rooflesoft Games I always used to play as Utd or benfica
Amiga 600, like it or loathe it? Vote now!
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Neil - RMC
I remember buying out an A600 from a friend in HS for cheap back in 1996, but back then my Sega Saturn was eating it for breakfast (and did not have a dedicated monitor for it, so playing it on the TV was also killing it). I still remember buying some Amiga magazine (one called Dream, that was then consolidating an audience from Amiga-only to every non-Windows bringing BeOS and other OSes) for it.
I ended boxing it and ship to a cousin in Syria so he could enjoy a computer as it was beyond affordable there (through PCs started to implement slowly but surely, thanks to the huge counterfeit market of bootleg copies and the cost of burning CDs going down).
I was kind of hoping there was a Micro SD card inside that SD card... Memory Matryoshka!
I was surprised by the fact that this is the rev 2D [the last] and not the early rev 1.0 or 1.1 [Aka A300]. This is because the PCMCIA slot vent edges in your case are of a tighter size-fit compared to other revisions. If you check other A600 cases, you will see that PCMCIA slots vents are of equal rectangular size [exact like those found on the A1200s].
Another thing to be aware of and to take note for those who are gonna disassemble for the first time is that the A600 case has the fragile clips on the back, where in this video it clearly shows that you had not struggle to detach the bottom part from the upper part of the case, that should mean they are already broken from the previous repairer[s].
My A600 upgrades include the ACA620EC accelerator board and an inbuilt GoTek drive, great for WHDload and also is the Amiga which I use for many events due to portability :)
Keep it up Neil, eagerly waiting for part 2 :)
As the 600 was my first, and only Amiga, I may love it more than most! There was some kind of work around for the numeric keypad, as one of my favourite PD games used it...however I have no idea what it was now!
Finally found a video worth watching.. just watched someone try and sell me a small oled monitor for £650 and another video for a video camera that £6000......I am so grateful for this video.
I got my Amiga 600 out of my parents loft a couple of months ago in preparation for a future episode like this. 😊
My A600 has a vampire in it, BUT before I bought that I ran it at stock speeds with 1mb Trapdoor and 9.5mb CPU piggy back expansion and honestly for "most" WHDload games it was fine. Running a pre-built Workbench install I used it for playing games, listening to mods and just faffing around with and loved every minute of it.
Hated the a600 when it came out, but it's the only Amiga that makes sense nowadays. All the other Amigas are too big.
Even the CD32 ? :)
My heavily expanded Amiga 500 disagrees... ;)
I Loved my 600 from the first day! It, ehm, she was my first own computer and I she stay with me till today! 😁
Same here! :)
Another original A600 owner joining in. I will never let it go :)
I worked for Packard Bell support in the late 90's. It taught me that it's OK to loathe a particular computer. Let the hate flow through you - do it!
Love the channel, always a pleasure to watch.
I picked up a refurbished A600 recently and it's laptop size form factor is useful when including it on a desk with other computers. A Gotek drive with external LED display is also useful.
The frustrating thing I have found, but this is common to other computers of this age is the keyboard.
Getting the keyboard to function consistently is difficult. The Amiga community is great for obtaining updated keyboard springs and keyboard membranes but the plungers with the rubber contacts deteriorate with age. I have improved the conductive nature of the plungers using KeyPad fix but still find 3 keys only work when pressed at certain angles. Repeatedly removing and reassembling the keyboard will also drive you nuts!
There is a new solid replacement membrane with replaceable ribbon and connector. It's great! I had the same problem as you. Now fixed. Google around.
@@laserwave6012 I do have one and I agree they are very good. I think the issue is with the plungers themselves, unfortunately they are the only part of the keyboard you cannot buy new :-)
I used to have all of the Camodor family and Amiga in 80 and 90 were the best days
If your only using the A600 for games it’s a great machine (unless you want to play certain flight sims 😀). The small form factor allows you to slide it into your setup with ease. Back in the day I would pop it in my back pack and take it round my mates house to play Lotus 2 with a null modem cable which we went halves on from Tandy.
Fits perfectly in a 15" laptop slim backpack with a modern psu :)
I love my A600, she has indivision ECS, 8Gb CF card, 4Mb fast ram and 2 MB chip ram. Running on 3.1.4 AmigaOS
i hope that you swap the capacitors too ;-)
I remember the warnings of peers, not to get an A500+, nor an A600 because of the incompatibility issues.
We were too poor for any of those machines, but my brother got an A500 from one of his friends in the 2000s in some kind of trading. Including the awesome stereo Commodore monitor.
Today, I‘d love owning an A600.
i love the a600, the issue back then was price, but i think it was worth it for the form factor. :) the amiga sure held its price over the decades. love the video's and all things amiga. i added a furia but the it didn't work on the june bug, but did work on the older model. not sure why because they both work fine.
The 600 was my entry into Amiga ownership, so I didn’t have the same view as an existing A500 owner would have had. I very quickly added a 122Mb hard drive which transformed the machine, and I used it for many years very happily. The fact that it looks great in the small footprint and white case means in the modern day, it’s a perfect “classic” Amiga, giving you access to pretty much all of the standard library of games without taking up all the desk space!
I still think it’s a great looking machine, and if taken out of context of its launch period, makes great sense to retro gamers now 👍
Back in the day, it was a mistake- but ironically enough, the design considerations make it remarkably versatile
Yaaaaay! Thursday, it’s an RMC Amiga vid! What a lovely intro to the pre-weekend
Excellent introduction to the A600. Back in the day, they were pretty worthless, especially to us in America who had probably already expanded the daylights out of our A2000's and A500's, or were eyeing the A3000. In 2020 I would love to have one though, as the compact size makes them very adorable. They are still pretty limited as far as expandability due to the PCMCA slot not really working well with more than four megabytes of RAM, but you can overcome that by sticking a vampire in there.
I had an A600 with a 1MB RAM upgrade and a 128 MB hard drive. I remember playing Monkey Island 2 on it having a great time while my friends juggled their 11 floppies to travel between the islands on their old pleb A500s. Also had a Kickstart 1.3 software solution installed on the hard drive so I could play the games that didn’t like the ECS chipset. No numeric keypad? No problem... I installed a program that could remap the keys to unused keys on the keyboard. Loved my A600.
The best thing about the A600 is that it flopped and the crazy discounts meant I could finally afford an Amiga
I always enjoy watching your Amiga content. I was the odd kid in the US that had a video toaster equipped Amiga 2500 while everyone else had IBM PC compatibles. When I switched to a PC in the 90s my parents donated my Amiga. I was sad then and years later I still am.
I’ve converted an old, empty Amiga 600 case into a MiSTer machine using a guide I found online and some 3D printed parts from eBay. It works brilliantly with the Minimig FPGA core and looks really neat, using the integrated keyboard through a Keyrah adapter card.
A bit unrelated, but ive just realised that SAAB's Trionic 5 engine management system released in early 1993 was more powerful than the A600. It had a Motorola 6800 running at 20Mhz, and 2MB of RAM. And 512kb of Storage. It was at the time, the most powerful and advanced engine management system in the world.
6800 or 68000? Makes several bits of a difference :) Anyways, in 1993 the 68k was already tremendously old news (introduced in 1979!). I mean the 68030 was already out in 1987, 68040 in 1991. back then those were very long years too as tech went forward rapidly. I guess Motorola never got their manufacturing process up to speed to make the chips cheaply enough. Or some government military program ate up all the production capacity. Who knows.
It seems that all these years I was under in the wrong impression that the A600 was a cut down version of the A1200. I never owned a A600, I had a A1200, which was gifted to me for my 18th birthday, and I had not been into the Amiga scene before that, later seeing the A600, assuming in was a cut down version of the A1200, given it looked almost the same, just without the 10 key pad.
yes, I think it was wasnt it ?
I totally understand why you don't like the machine but to me it's a 500 in a slim, lightweight case that looks phenomenal. For someone who has problems lifting things (health issues) A600 is best 'cause I can carry it around with ease.
My Amiga 600 was my first Amiga, so I have a lot of love for it. I got it when I was 13, having saved up my paper round money for *months* - remember the thrill of going into Dixons in Sheffield and finally getting this machine I'd wanted for soooo long, along with the Wild, Weird and Wicked pack (and a joystick that Dixons threw in for free). I didn't know (or care) about the controversies that surrounded the 600 - I was just so glad to finally have an Amiga (though I did spot an A1200 in another shop window and tried to persuade my parents that I should buy that as it was the same price, but better; however, that didn't come with any games so that didn't work). And it lasted me a good decade, most of that time with 1 floppy drive and 2 megs of RAM - wrote all my school and uni essays on it, including my dissertation!
But I can see now why it was disliked, although that doesn't change my opinion of the machine. I think if you were new to the Amiga it wasn't a bad entry point, but I can see that if you had an A500/+ then it didn't offer much in the way of reasons to upgrade.
I do wish I'd saved up afterwards for an Amiga 1200, though!
I didn't have an Amiga 600, but my brother and I loved our A500. I took it to University too. I used it for all my school assignments, games and I went on some local BBSs too. We had 1 meg of RAM and one external floppy. We enjoyed so many great games on it! It was an amazing Chritmas present for us.
So, things that I like about the A600 for modern use over an A500. It’s more portable with a vga to 23 pin adaptor plug in, memory exp for chip and fast ram installed and wireless networking PCMCIA card (more on that in a moment) in the slot and everything you want is in the unit. So it is lug around or pull out of cupboard as the case maybe. You can even add a pretty decent accelerator if you want to. Networking isn’t so easy and cheep on other Amigas other than A600 and A1200, I have brought a couple of networking PCMCIA cards an ethernet card and wireless card 802.11 card. So that is why I like the A600 more now than I did in the day.
Ben
Loved the A600 growing up . Perfect form factor for a kids bedroom.
I loved my A600 back in the day - for someone purchasing a new Amiga in 1993, it looks sleeker and sexier than the old lump A500, and wasn't as expensive as the A1200. In retrospect I should have upgraded it with a hard drive though, but those weren't cheap in 1993 and opening up a machine was an alien world for me back then - getting one from the store would have bumped the price up by 50% for a 64Mb drive!
The upgrades you've gone for pretty much reflect what I have for my modern day A600, although I substituted the Wicher for a static RAM PCMCIA card, which gives me an extra 2Mb. I'd heard a few stories of the over-chip upgrades popping off unceremoniously, so I decided to steer clear at the time. 4Mb total RAM runs most WHDLoad stuff. I also upgraded the mouse and joystick but I suspect you might have one or two Monster Joysticks sitting around :)
The only other consideration is connecting to a monitor. I picked up an RGB to SCART lead, and then upscaled it into the VGA socket on a 15Hz compliant monitor. There are options for RGB to VGA I believe, but I have the option to go straight into a TV too with this setup.
Looking forward to the next video! You treat that A600 right! :D
I just bought a 17 inch Benq multi-scan monitor for this purpose. Surprisingly good specs and image quality. GBP94 from CPC.
The A600 was my gateway into desktop computing/gaming, I absolutely loved it.
Growing up in a low income household, I never expected to have my own computer, just hand me down consoles from extended family. But, in 1994 my parents were able to scrape together enough money to buy me a 2nd hand A600 for Christmas.
Christmas morning arrives and i was left dumbfounded to find what was lurking beneath that awful wrapping paper, my very own Amiga (Bundled with the most ghetto, cobbled together "game pack" the computer shop had thrown together i might add)
Sure, it wasn't the shiny, brand spanking new A1200 my cousin had received for his birthday earlier that year but this A600 was MINE and it opened me up to a whole world that i had never seen before. I was particularly enamoured by the demo scene and cracktros, going as far as to get more excited for a new cracked game just to see the latest intro/music/greetz and bbs info.
Oh my gosh that was repaired the day I was born!
How are your capacitors holding out?
@@RMCRetro I think I should see my doctor about a recap if I'm honest
And now all of us 'Thatcher generation' feel old!
@@RMCRetro This is an excellent joke and I don't want to diminish it in any way. However this being a nerd channel, I was just about to comment a correction about the capacitor plague. The plague was a late-90's phenomenon and hadn't started when Amigas were being made. The caps in the Amiga era were mostly well made and if they're failing now it's from graceful old age rather than stolen (and broken) electrolyte recipes.
I think my caps are leaking. Hmm.
Another great video, thanks Neil. I have never owned an Amiga, and probably never will due to the cost, but still really enjoy watching the restoration and upgrade videos.
I had an A500+ with the HD8 hard disk with 8Mb of RAM. I LOVED that machine. I also had an A600 with 60Mb HDD. I think I've still got them both round my partners folks mouldering away in a shed somewhere. Neil, you've inspired me to try and dig them out. :)
Loved my Amiga 500 back in the early 90s. I remember swapping out the ROM to use the newer Workbench 2.1. Then I bought a sidecar expansion that held a 105 MB IDE drive and had 8 RAM slots that I eventually filled. I bought 1 x 1MB SIMM every paycheque. I remember each 1 MB SIMM was $100. This Amiga served me fine until I upgraded to an Amiga 4000 when it was released. I bought an Emplant Mac emulator board for the A4000 and had a faster colour Mac than my real Mac owner friends did. They spent $5000, I spent $500 for the board. I think I had a 2400 baud modem with my A500 and eventually got a 14 400 baud with my A4000. Great times. Sadly, I sold my A4000 around 1995 or 1996 and bought the parts to make my first Windows PC. What a step backwards that was in terms of multimedia.
I fell in love on the first look. And never stopped loving. Unfortunately, never got to have her. :-(
I got her second hand in 1991. I was 7yo so i didn't care that she had been touched before. Just happy to get some
I found one in great conditions among the garbage..
What a trip down memory lane, I loved my A600 can’t wait for part two - subscribed 👍🏻😁
Oh man i loved this episode, when i saw the Amiga Format a genuine tear formed m8, thanks for that :D
I miss the days when I would wait all month for my Amiga Format to hit the door mat. I'd pour over those pages and read it over and over... until next month's issue arrived.
I got an A600 recently, getting recapped. I have 3.1.4 ROM, 4MB expansion, 1MB CHIPRAM, IDE-SD Card adaptor, PCMCIA wireless card.
For any one who gets a Amiga A500, A600 and A1200 a modern PSU is a must, and recaping as well if you are not sure of the age of them.
Thankfully the A1200 was out at more or less the same time which did of course offer significant upgrades over the A500. Shame it didn't come out a year or so earlier though as it was just really catching up with PCs instead of overtaking.
True, though by coming on the market so soon after the A600, the A1200 made the A600 look even worse. It launched for roughly the same price as the A600, with twice the amount of RAM, AGA chipset, numeric keypad and easier expandability via the trapdoor slot.
@@JimmiG84 Yep, I'm sure just about anyone who bought an A600 would have been very pissed off seeing the A1200 launch soon after.
I wrote about this elsewhere, but Commodore made such a mess with that product launch. A A1200 launch in May 1992 (to allow time for any revisions needed before the Christmas rush) combined with a low-profile cheap A300 (not A600!) a couple of months later would have given Amiga an incredibly powerful range for Christmas 92.
They then would have had around 2 years from the launch of the A1200 to get a Hombre-based product onto the market. A Hombre-based console would have been a huge winner at Christmas 94, and they could have created a backwards-compatible A-something to sell to people who wanted a proper computer a few months later.
At that point, Commodore would have had a very strong lineup - a bargain basement A300 for those wanting a cheap home computer, the A1200 for those wanting something tried, tested and functional, the Hombre Console for those wanting state-of-the-art gaming, and the Hombre Computer for those wanting the best of both worlds, and all this before the PS1 launched in North America/Europe. There was still demand in 1994-5 for cheap home computers, and the A300/A1200 would have done nicely.
The PC would have fought back with Windows 95, but the profits from Hombre alone would have probably been enough to position Commodore in a move towards console gaming. In their place, I would have ditched the home computer stuff (support it, but don't bother releasing something new) and focused on a Hombre Console II to come out by Christmas 1998.
Commodore were always going to lose the home computer war once Windows 95 came out, but they had the console market with their technology if they wanted it.
As a kid, I saw a 600 complete with joysticks, printer and dozens of floppies on a flea market.
The only reason mom couldn't buy it for me is the transport because she had no car.
I still think the 600 is a nice game machine.
Not sure why the A600 has so much hate. I love mine.
@Daniel Johnson I just mean in general. Many people are quick to trash the A600. Even back in the day, smaller form factor with built in IDE controller...win win for me.
@@cbmeeks Exactly! Personally, it was the A500 I didn't like. If anything, the A600 should have been £120 cheaper though.
For me, I can't play Dungeon Master with the keyboard making A600 rubbish. I installed a keyrah in mine too use a ps2 keyboard, but then it's bigger than an A500, defeating the purpose of its size.
@@cbmeeks In the five years between 87 and 92 the PC market has leaped forward, and the A600 was more expensive and had an IDE. As much of an Amiga fan I’ve been over the years, it didn’t progress nearly fast enough to have been able to survive in term:(
Because it had no slow ram and broke compatibility with games
I always loved the look of the A600, a friend got one and I did often admire it sat there in his room all sleek and compact but yeah, likewise I’d had my A500+ a year by then so there was never any need to actually own one.
I too drifted away to the glamour of a PC.. because you know, Doom.
Nice! I purchased an Amiga 600 1 year ago and I have the same upgrades except for the fast RAM I have 4mb. I'm in the middle of recap now :X
Less then half way to A1200, A300 original name fits it well
I had one of those GVP HD8+ units. It transformed my miggy into such a great machine. Brilliant bit of kit. I saw one in Oz last year on ebay for about £500!
The A600 was a poor step for C=, but I've two of them now, one with a Vampire and I NOW love them.
The Amiga 600 is a cute little machine. Back then before the AGA / A600 release, my computer was an Amiga 1000 with 2MB RAM, 25MB HD, De-interlacer add-on and a 14Mhz 68000 accelerator, the A600 was a downgrade as I didn’t want another keyboard-computer.
When the A4000 came out, I went to the store to check it out.
First, I didn’t care for their new white and brown color for the case. I considered an A1200 as a possibility as Commodore was stupid to NOT make a low-end Amiga a detached keyboard. Imagine that, If they made an “Amiga 1400” for $200 more (An A1200 in a pizza box form factor) I would have considered it, room for a 3.5” HD and use an A4000 keyboard.
The AGA Amigas requires a SPECIAL monitor to display both interlace and de-interlace modes. Games required interlace. The deinterlacer was SUBSTANDARD compared to the A3000 and even the A1000 add-on. It had a stripe effect. ITS NOT PROFESSIONAL.
With that, I did NOT want ANY Amiga AGA and besides, C= put me in a bind. I didn’t want to spend $600 for the A1200 + $300 for the C= monitor for a keyboard-computer The 68030 version of the A4000 was around $2500, out of my budget. Oh, and the A4000 was uglier than the A2000.
At that point, I knew C= was going to die. So many stupid business decisions. So, I bought a brand new A3000 (68030/25Mhz) for $800. I was already running AmigaOS3.0 on my Amiga 1000 running in 8 color desktop mode.
If commodore wasn’t so stupid, they would have destroyed Apple/Mac and likely make a good dent in the PC market.
The A600 was my first and only Amiga until I bought a CD32 last year. I thought it was a cracking little machine and it was the Another World advert that sold it to me. I’m glad I still have it but it’s at my parents house. Definitely on the list for a refurb and will be looking forward to the next set of videos. Currently recapping the CD32 and SMD caps are not my favourite right now.
Great video Neil. Keep them coming!
I'm of the mindset to expand the capability of any computer I get ahold of, from doing the maximum compatible RAM upgrade to anything else which enables the computer to do more than its original specs.
Makes sense, though I think it's way too easy to take that too far, and in a sense it kind of defeats the purpose of buying an old machine. Like you could take an old Amiga and throw a few hundred dollars at it and get an FPGA processor like the Vampire, hundreds of MB of RAM, and a huge solid-state hard drive, scan doubler, HDMI output, etc... The result would be more powerful than any vintage Amiga - and in a sense not quite an Amiga any more. Also a total waste in any practical sense, as the machine would still be inferior to $50 worth of Raspberry Pi.
Personally, all that said, I am interested in adding modern upgrades to my old Amiga - really in my case the only thing holding me back is that I never had an Amiga before, and want to experience the machine as it is before I start changing it too radically.
ahhhh yes - the good ol Amiga Format mags, this was when we had no internet and had to wait for the latest and greatest...and when the mags came out it was worth the wait. Sometimes waiting just makes things so much better.
The Amiga 600 was the first Amiga that I ever had, and it sparked a life-long love for the platform. It was also the second Amiga that I ever had, after the floppy drive stopped working on the first and I got rid of it, and picked up the second in around 1998 for £3, and sadly that one lasted about a month before I accidentally stood on it in the middle of the night. I never had any issues with software compatibility (legally owned software, that is - there were some less than legal copies of games that I had that wouldn't work but that's different: all legal software I got worked fine). Nice little machine, still love them.
I had a VIC 20, my first computer, and used it happily for a couple of years. But it went out of production and I was not happy about that. So I bought a C128 and prepared myself to be wowed by it. I can count the number of times I booted up in 128 mode on one hand. Then it too went out of production. Buy myself an Amiga? After having been burned twice by CBM? Nope. I went over to the pc side. I did though, stay partially loyal to Commodore--my first pc was a Colt. I used it for several years and sold it to someone. Commodore is just a memory to me now.
Great video! I bought my first PC in 1991 after being a die hard Amiga fan for years. The Amiga 500 was such a revolution when it came out. All my friends had Commodore 64, 128 or ZX Spectrums, but I never understood the appeal. I thought they sucked and I spend my money at the local arcade instead where sound and graphics were in a different league. Then the A500 came and I instantly became a computer enthusiast. But it was slow, and when it couldn't keep up with Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon I upgraded to a 386 PC and haven't used an Amiga ever since. I do look forward to the A500 mini though to play some classics and hopefully it will be able to play some demos which was the coolest thing about the Amiga scene if you aske me.
Really enjoying your videos. Ahhh the Amiga 600. My most hated machine in the Amiga line of computers. Back in the 90's i had an Amiga 500. When the time came to upgrade to a better Amiga, i had 2 options in my price range when i visited an Amiga dealer. There was a used A2500 in top condition. It had an 030 card, hard drive and some extra fast ram inside. The other option was a brand new A600 without a hard drive. I went with the A600 and dreaded the decision pretty much the first day i got it home. I was a huge demo fan so thats the first thing i tried. I was disappointed that a lot of the demos i enjoyed watching on me A500 did not work on the A600. I spoke to the guys at the Amiga store and they suggested that i needed a rom swapper with Kickstart 1.3 as thats what my A500 had, so i bought the rom swapper and a kickstart 1.3 chip. I also bought 1mb extra ram for the trap door as i needed it for some of the larger animations i wanted to watch. As soon as i got home, i began fitting the rom swapper and extra ram. I eagerly boot the A600 with kickstart 1.3 and insert one the demo that would not run. To my surprise, after forking out extra money i really could have used on other things, the demo still did not run. I founf out later that some of the demos needed slow ram. I only kept the A600 for a few months before trading the whole lot for just $120au at cash converters cause i was so disappointed with the machine. I ended up getting another A500 and later moved to an A1200. Since then up to a few years ago, i have revisited the A600 on 3 occasions thinking my experience with it will be different. On all 3 occasions i ended up selling the thing in disappointment. A lot of people tell me, "you should have kept it and used it as whdload machine" but if you where a big fan of Amiga demo's and used your Amiga as a main computer for all of the 90's like myself, you would know that what is available on whdload is probably only a quarter (if that) of the Amiga software available.
Not sure if i read correct a while ago, not sure if whdload software will run on a 68000 CPU. I read it needs a 68010 or above. I could be wrong though?? Hope the A600 does you well in the end of all this. Cheers
Amiga 600 is love. Amiga 600 is life! 😍
A500 was my love, installed some (1Mb fast) memory on the actual motherboard, had a huge 8MB in the expansion slot, 28MHz accelerator, plus a 100Mb hard drive, which had a 2Mb of memory expansion. And of course the kickstar switcher, 1.3 or 2.04, and perhaps there was ECS also. Good times.
@BigLBA1 why is (was) the Amiga 600 released 7 or 8 years too late?
I never had an A600 back in the day but I have one now and it's an awesome machine. A1200 prices are crazy and getting crazier by the minute. The A600 is a nice compromise and looks sweet in a Plexilaser case if that's your bag. Another top vid Neil. 👍
The A600 was my first Amiga back in 1992, best Christmas present ever! I can see how it would have been a disappointment to A500 owners waiting for an upgraded machine. Although a neat system the A600 didn't offer enough to get people to upgrade.
Commodore probably should have just focused a getting the A1200 out sooner, most people who bought the A600 probably would have just bought an A1200 instead given the pricing and Commodore might not have lost disappointed users, like Neil, to other platforms.
When you put that pipe there my mind went: "C'est ne pas un Amiga A600"
Glad I'm not the only one that made that connection lol
probably set the mind from Andy Warhol's "Banana"
Great Video as always.
I do also have to admit the same as the comment below however... - Myself, as well the majority of the people who I knew with Amigas back in the day, were genuinely under the impression that the A600 was a new machine and the lessor, cut down machine version of the A1200 - given that 600 is half of 1200, same colour and design, albeit smaller etc.
A clever play by whoever decided on the A600 name to make a lot of people think this
Many A600s didn't have the top shielding installed from the factory.
I had 2 A600s and both had leaked capacitors. In one, this led to the complete breakdown of the PCB paths around the audio filters.
Nevertheless, I still like the A600, for its compact form factor (it is about the same size as Atari 65XE, and it fits into my laptop bag, together with a laptop).
My upgrades consist of a CF-IDE adapter, Kickstart 3.1, 1MB Chip RAM expansion + RTC, and a 4MB Fast RAM expansion.
I really regret, choosing another expansion than Wicher 608 :( I have SukkoPera's Open Amiga 600 Fast Ram Expansion, which is more expensive, and only 4MB. The PCMCIA card won't work with 8MB Fast RAM board. I have 4MB, but had no luck with finding a working adapter/card combination.
P.S.
"Wicher" is supposed to be spelled as "vi-her", and its name means "a gale".
I miss this kind of project on RMC video, bild a "new" of old tech, and I like it, of course! Can't wait to see 2nd part. Cheers! 🍻⌨️🔧
I look forward to watching the next video to see how it turns out.
I thought the form factor was great as the original a500 was just way too big to fit in my desk lol.
Shame they didn't upgrade the clock speed then at least a500 owners would of had a reason to swap to this . The price was too high too as said in the video it needed to be cheaper not more expensive
My first and only amiga, Love Amiga600.
I love this idea of reviving my A600 and making it accessible through the PCMCIA slot.
My first and only Amiga. I loved it.
The most frustrating computer-buying decision I ever experienced was the 600. My family bought one about 6 months before the 1200 was announced, so what we had was basically obsolete almost instantly.
This is the content I like to watch on your channel! Back to the origins!
This reminds me I need to finish restoring my A600
Can’t wait to see the finished product!
Just wanted to say great job with this video, I really enjoyed it, thanks for taking the time to make it!
My pleasure David, thank you for watching!
Wow. In late '90, I bought my first PC for around £500 equivalent. No multimedia, but a 25 MHz 386 with a 40 MB hd. That included a 1024x768 monitor. It's unbelievable that anyone at Commodore thought the A600 was a good idea.
SX or DX?
@@r.m.renfield4541 DX, with cache! Still remember, because I was pretty proud of the purchase.
Great video Neil, I really hope you start to fall in love with the mini miggy over the following episodes! I use an A600 as my "daily" and I absolutely love its upgrade-ability and compact size. I run a Furia with PCMCIA card, Plipbox and Null modem transfer cable (because you can never have enough ways to send stuff to your Amiga!) One simple upgrade you didn't mention but have probably already considered is a video/scart lead. Approx £15 of ebay. Thanks for the PSU link BTW. Will take a look. Good luck with the upgrades, those surface mounted caps can be an arse! Cheers
I can't resist these Amiga videos. The memories flood back and I learn something from every video I watch on this and other channels. Its funny how I really disliked this model but today I can't help but see how charming it is.
This was my first amiga which I got in my christmas stocking in 92. I have very font memories of this one and kitted it out with a 40mb hard-disk and cd-rom drive via the PCMCIA slot. Lets just say, the specs and the other cost reductions convinced me by 1993 to upgrade to an accelerated A1200.
While I myself have been using an Amiga 2000 and then an Amiga 3000 I really liked the Amiga 600.
They were sold out at amazingly low prices. My whole family -uncle, brother, cousin, father bought Amiga 600 for prices around 150-200DM ~ $100-$150. And why not, it was a reasonable complete system after you installed a used hard drive for another $20. It was good enough for Small Office Home Office, good enough to connect to Fidonet, Usenet and the early 1990 Internet. And it had a ton of nice games available cheaply. Most of my family kept using it until XP on Ghz systems which as at least eight years.
In my oppinion there was never again such a complete system for such a low price until the Pi 400.
Btw, instead of a PCMCIA-memory-card I would have installed a PCMCIA ethernet solution. It works great and is of a lot more use than an SD card.
I recently got my first Amiga, and looked more or less the same way at the A600 and even A1200. While I like the capabilities of the later models, they represent a point where the Amiga was clearly falling behind expectations, while the A500 was the one I marveled at when I saw it in the shop... By the time the A600 came out I was saving all my pennies to buy my first PC, dreaming of Wing Commander and X-Wing.
To me the great thing about the PCMCIA slot is it makes it fairly inexpensive to add good network hardware to the machine. If anything, that and the compact size are what would have pushed me toward the A600 instead of the A500 I got.
The machine I got is kind of a compromise - rev 5 NTSC and missing a lot of accessories (and I carelessly overpaid for it), but that's turned it into a bit of a project and I think that will ultimately make it more fun.
Love this channel! Nostalgia overload every time I watch. Love these build videos, there like trash to treasure, thanks Neil!
Thanks Iain, yeah this series is basically T2T except the A600 isn't really in bad enough condition to consider it trash cosmetically. Glad you're enjoying it!