Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Favorite
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The 600 isn't a "repackaged Amiga 1000" or a "cut-down version of the Amiga 500". It didn't make sense in the line-up when Commodore introduced it, but it's definitely a step-up from the A1000 and A500. Having the Enhanced Chip Set[0] meant getting the Productivity video modes on a multisync monitor.
The internal ATA controller was also a big enhancement as compared to the A500 and A1000, too. Laptop IDE/ATA drives were getting pretty common. When equipped with a hard disk it was vastly more portable than an A500 (w/ a "sidecar" hard disk drive module).
Having the built-in color composite video output was a "win" for just plugging it into a TV or VCR. Again, that helped with portability as compared to an A500.
As a retro machine it is a cute little machine. The community has definitely stepped-up with enhancements for the A600, though.
I think once the 1200 came out it was just an odd product in the lineup. The 1200 made way more sense given the massive upgrade across CPU, memory, chipset and OS
If anything, the A600 is a downgrade because it's missing the Zorro expansion bus...
They could’ve skipped the A600 entirely and just left the A500 Plus on the market.
So I decided to check some prices in 1992 computer catalogs and I'm not sure this is really true. Looking at the Tandy catalog[0], you could get a Tandy 1000 RLX with a 10 MHz 286, 512k of RAM, VGA and a monitor for $1K, but it didn't come with a hard drive at that price. The same catalog also lists a Tandy 1000 RL with a 9.5 MHz 8086, 512k of RAM and CGA/Tandy graphics for $500 without monitor. I think the 600 actually fairs pretty well against that machine.
Looking at a Sears catalog from 1992, they have a Packard Bell 386SX with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB HD for $1100, but without a monitor. The cheapest monitor option on that page was another $290.
Obviously two random catalogs doesn't give you comprehensive pricing data, but at least from this quick look it does seem like the 600 was reasonably competitive at the $500 price point it was sold at.
Seems to me the bigger problems were higher up the product line. Not having a real response to the rise of VGA (first introduced 1987) until October 1992 was a huge miss.
[0] https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/c1992_rsc-23.htm...
[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1992-Sea...
It was about 15000 euros (300723 escudos) in 1992's money, which given our economy meant a credit spread over three years.
Meanwhile, Amigas were at a quarter of that value, and most folks used the TV anyway, I think I only saw Amigas plugged into monitors at the computer stores.
The disappointment was A1200 and A4000. The A1200 was not enough for gaming, A4000 was not enough for workstation use. Both could have been so much better with pretty minor changes.
Commodore basically catered to no market segment.
Edit: the A1200 could have been better (twice the speed for calculations) if it had some just a tiny sliver of fast RAM instead of only chip RAM. And so on. It should also have had a VGA connector, it wouldn't have cost more than a few cents. People used TVs because the couldn't find multisync monitors. Commodore, a fractal of bad business decisions.
As for the VGA connector, there was a cheap Amiga RGB->VGA adapter available. Connectivity wasn't the problem. The issue was that VGA monitors couldn't cope with a 15 kHz PAL/NTSC signal. Many didn't work with the 50 Hz PAL refresh, either. In order for a VGA connector to be meaningful, hardware would've been needed to address this, adding to the cost of the machine - and ruining the 50 Hz sync of a massive, pre-existing games library.
Back in the day, people didn't even know Amiga 1200 could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of. If it had a VGA connector people would know they could run productivity software on a regular monitor. Having a TV for gaming and a monitor for word processing would have been fine. There's precedent with Atari supporting both regular (TV-like frequencies) monitors and the monochrome monitor for productivity.
(IIRC you had to press both mouse buttons at boot or something like that to get VGA frequencies. All of this could have been made automatic if the VGA monitor was plugged in or something. BOM cost would have been almost 0. No strategic thinking at all at Commodore leadership, no understanding of the market.)
Whether or not people knew of the scandoubled modes back in the day, well, me and all my friends certainly did, and all the A1200 reviews I've read mentions them. Having both a TV and a VGA monitor sort of defeats the purpose of a cheap, compact entry-level machine. Atari users typically had _either_, not _both_: The monochrome monitor was for the DTP and music studio markets.
There was no mode switching in the early startup menu, apart from being able to toggle between NTSC and PAL. Selection of AGA scandoubled modes were made in the Workbench preferences. Adding some kind of auto-sensing hardware would add to the cost of the machine and require a rewrite of Workbench to cope with this in some way without interfering with screenmode preferences (and what if you indeed had both a TV and a VGA monitor hooked up at the same time?).
In hindsight, I think the A1200 was a decent solution to a hard problem: constructing a cheap, worthwhile upgrade while remaining compatible with as much existing software and hardware as possible.
The Commodore monitors which were released at the time intended for use with A1200/A4000, the 1940 and 1942, had a permanently attached 15-pin VGA cable. I know because I have one for my A1200.
These monitors were dual-sync 15 and 31 KHz devices, and were perfectly usable as a VGA monitor with a PC. Probably not a lot of PC users bought them.
But if you bought the 1940 for use with the Amiga 1200, you couldn't plug it into the computer without a 15->23 pin adapter. I'm sure it came with the adapter in the box, but still...
So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it, like .. on the regular, much cheaper.
Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in those days.
(Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)
And for home users and even smaller businesses - that’s just what you did.
Not sure what the proper conclusion is about how competitive the pricing of the 600 was from that, but I think the catalog does reinforce how much further in the hole they were a bit higher up the price chart. If you wanted to spend a bit more, the only 1st party offering from Commodore until the fall of 1992 was the Amiga 3000. Not sure what they were charging for one of those at the time, but apart from the builtin SCSI I don't think it compares very favorably with a 386DX with SVGA and those weren't all that expensive by then. The 4000 did launch a little after this catalog, but it was priced much higher than the 486 systems that were already on the market.
[0] https://archive.org/details/computer-shopper-august-1992/
It would have been more accurate to say that as PCs became faster they became capable of mixing multiple audio samples together before playing them through a stereo (ie. "2 voice") DSP - using the greater CPU power to match (and, eventually, exceed) the Amiga's sound capabilities.
In general, I suspect the author is misunderstanding secondary sources, rather than misremembering first-hand experience.
Before that, the only way to get a configuration at the same price was typically some Amstrad PC (typically the popular PC1512), far less capable in terms of graphics and music.
It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.
It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.
Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.
Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.
Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.
There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.
Of course, retroarch has an Amiga emulator as well.
I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code.
Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of WinUAE on their own comp.
Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind of usage.
Oh, I haven't been paying attention, haven't realized this came out in the meantime! Thanks
The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest nearly-an-Amiga...
For a modern FPGA setup, I'd look at miSTer. There's an excellent miniMig core for it, complete with AGA support, and it is open source hardware.
If I were to go there, I’d go MiSTer or a clone instead, and save a load of cash in the process. You’ll get an A1200 level + AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the content from the Amiga scene.
When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.
After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.
At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.
I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.
I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.
But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.
Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.
Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features present on AmigaOS.
Look... comparing Amiga platformers to Commander Keen is insulting. Amiga had "Genesis style games" not "Commander Keen style games"
Amiga games looked and sounded like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtLGDywZlg
No. actually smooth, unlike a PC.
One game frame per each frame sent to the screen. Which the PC would only achieve many years later when it got raw power via 3d acceleration.
This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games were there and the games were great to play, the first game I bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer, soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 - 100 games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I then bought a A1200 but it was not the same...
Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed there would be a release at some point.
Three words, plug and play!
I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an inch out )) lol It showcased the A600 and the style of the machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so.
The A500, A600 and A1200 are all prone to discoloration....
I still have two A600's and one A1200 and all of them are still working, not bad for a computer that is 33 years old and took a battering for many years.
:)
The author is from the US and is relating his experience that what he saw around him at the time. Every article I read about the Amiga from someone in the UK or EU is also "tilted" based on their experiences. There was no global experience when it came to the Amiga, other than it started in the US first and died in the UK/EU. By the time the 1200 made a big splash overseas, the US was well down another path - the road that ultimately became everyone's. So there's a time-shift at play and a regional one. How that played into the PC/Mac market in their respective regions is really up to economics at the time.
>I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
Agree about wishing AGA was way too little, way too late. I wish they'd released it no later than 1990 rather than the end of 1992. Maybe then Commodore could have kept the massive US market's interest longer than they did. The choices Commodore made, well... it's no wonder what happened, happened.
Doom came along and was the first PC game that was standout with "must have" wow factor. I remember spending hours late one night getting 3 person multi player working via some ghetto IPX over serial hack.
Some thoughts:
* Commodore could have added a faster 68000, and it seems like a good idea in theory. But in order for a faster CPU to have any meaningful impact, they would have needed to add either a sizeable cache or, preferably, some real fastmem (memory that isn't shared with the custom graphics and audio hardware). This would have raised the cost significantly.
* The text doesn't mention the Amiga 500 Plus, also released in 1992, just before the A600. It was an upgraded A500 featuring Kickstart 2.0, the ECS chipset and 1 meg of chipmem. People who had bought an A500+ felt fooled by Commodore, and rightly so: Adding a hard drive to the A600 meant the cost of a stand-alone 2.5" IDE drive. Adding one to an A500/+ involved a sidecar expansion that cost about as much as the computer itself.
* The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
* It wasn't really fully software-compatible with the A500. In part because of the newer Kickstart, in part because of the lack of the A500's peculiar "slowfast" memory that many games took for granted, and in part because of the newer ECS chipset. The same problems afflicted the A500+, and meant that large amounts of already existing games just didn't work. This was the fault of the software houses, sure, but gamers looking for a good deal didn't care; they'd rather buy a second-hand A500 than gamble with an incompatible machine that offered no significant hardware upgrade.
* People in the know who were on the market for an Amiga in 1993 or 1994 probably bought an A1200.
If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed to compete with themselves.
I think the lucas boards were 25mhz MC68030,and within a few weeks,we had gotten 33mhz parts w/ FPUs and soldered on new crystals. Such an incredible source of cheap fun, while the I world was struggling with widows 1,2,3. The Amiga was, as was claimed, head and hands above the PC until the 486s became cheap 8~10 years later. Amigas ruled. Too bad commodore were such schmucks.
But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big leap was from 1.3 to 2.0
(of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if you wanted)
Commodore actually did release an official KS2.0x ROM upgrade for the A500.
It had other improvements than just support for the AGA chipset's video modes. "Datatypes" were pretty neat. Thanks to it, the Amiga got PNG support in all web browsers before many other platforms got it at all.
From today's perspective, A600 is... annoying, which I've found out a few years ago. The architecture choices are hard to work with: the PCMCIA slot limits the amount of memory you can work with (well, unless you don't want to use it but it's almost indispensable, esp. for data transfer), the internal bus only accepts "slow" RAM - the desired Fast RAM (CPU exclusive) can only be added by expansions put directly over the CPU itself. Sure, there are Vampires and PiStorms but the compatibility of both can be a bit spotty, and if you're dumping that much on the system you must love it specifically, lest you'd just go with an A1200 which is superior in every respect.
On that note, currently the easiest no-brainer Amiga to actually have fun with without eating your budget too much is an A1200. Slap an 8MB fast ram expansion, an IDE CF controller, and 3.2.2 OS/ROM it's ready to go. WHDLoad installs exist for every important game and many obscure ones too, data transfer can go either via PCMCIA>CF card, or a Parallel Port contraption that reads microSD cards. And if you want more power (though I can't imagine why, unless you want to run Doom on it), TerribleFire cards aren't too pricey. 128MB RAM + 030/060 CPU is a substantial boost (note: games, especially early 3D, will break with that much power).
Just watch for leaky capacitors (thankfully there's a whole industry for fixing this), and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore).
That is definitely a Commodore tradition. I had a C64 back that had a PSU die in 1985 and took out all of the DRAM chips.
(FWIW, I acquired mine two years ago, and it looks like recent sales on ebay are in the same ballpark...)
And retro gaming/computing is a growing hobby. There's so much new hardware and software out there for old platforms now, letting you add never-before-possible upgrades (e.g. PiStorm for the Amiga), get decent output to a modern TV, and sometimes give them shiny new cases and keyboards. Which is great if you already had a collection of retro machines, but not so much if you're trying to buy them now, with increased demand and ever diminishing supply.
Also, the article mentions the AGA chip with no introduction of it. Some sort of editing mix up?
As anything Commodore ever did, Amiga was far overengineered for what it did.
That being said, there are only two Amigas worth remembering: - A500 as original one ( A1000 was overpriced crap) - A1200 as a cheap successor. Its upgrade value was "meh", but it was cheap. And there were games, actually using those extras. And it had a cheap HDD option (used an IDE drive).
Deluxe Paint, tracker music, Video Toaster w/Lightwave, all Amiga achievements. And all systems were extremely good value for the dollar until late VGA era. Europe understood and appreciated that; US unfortunately had Commodore main branch, which was very self-sabotaging, to put it mlildly.
I remember going through a TON of pirated SW to get useful PCB CAD programs on Amiga (being the graphic "beast" of the time) and wasted a ton on non-PC harware (basically everything from Sinclair QL to Atari ST lines and Amigas, from 500 to 1200) only to admit defeat years later and settle on plain old DOS PC and Tango.
Amiga was ATROCIOUS for everything besides gaming. Its graphics was great only on paper - until you had it on the desk and havign to use it daily.
It was cheaper than a PC and much nicer to use - Windows was terrible in that era, the janky mouse jumping all over the place under load due to no hardware sprite and serial buffer overrun.
Meanwhile an Amiga under 100% CPU would have a silky smooth mouse due to hardware mouse port tracking and sprite pointer.
Then you had stuff like autoconfig hardware that was 10 years ahead of its time.
Amiga was smooth just as long as CPU usage was low and as long one used the stuff that its chipset could do.
And all that "smoothness" was useless once one got above what TV can do. I used PC for DOS Tango (schematic and PCB CAD) for example and even cheap Tseng ET-4000 card with 1MB would put Amiga to shame as it could do 1280x1024x16 colors.
Yes, animation speed wasn't great, but it worked. Two years later I had Diamond Stealth 2MB which could do 1600x1200x16 colors, running circles around anything any Amiga could do.
People bought it for the games, then got interested in the creative possibilities. At the very least it inspired a generation of game developers, digital artists, and electronic music creators.
Meanwhile, many PCs of the time only had PC speaker audio capabilities, the horrible palette of EGA, and the inability to scroll the screen smoothly. And a DOS prompt rather than a smoothly-multitasking GUI.
Yes, there were only a few short years before the PC caught up/overtook the Amiga. But for those few years, the Amiga was something really special.