Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

I think the article is a little hard on the 600 in its stock configuration. (That's not to say that Commodore did a great job with it, in terms of product-line placement. Oh, Commodore... >sigh<)

The 600 isn't a "repackaged Amiga 1000" or a "cut-down version of the Amiga 500". It didn't make sense in the line-up when Commodore introduced it, but it's definitely a step-up from the A1000 and A500. Having the Enhanced Chip Set[0] meant getting the Productivity video modes on a multisync monitor.

The internal ATA controller was also a big enhancement as compared to the A500 and A1000, too. Laptop IDE/ATA drives were getting pretty common. When equipped with a hard disk it was vastly more portable than an A500 (w/ a "sidecar" hard disk drive module).

Having the built-in color composite video output was a "win" for just plugging it into a TV or VCR. Again, that helped with portability as compared to an A500.

As a retro machine it is a cute little machine. The community has definitely stepped-up with enhancements for the A600, though.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Enhanced_Chip_Set

Agree, definitely not a repackaged 1000 / 500. It also shipped with Kickstart 2.0 / Workbench 2.0 which was a pretty decent upgrade on 1.3 that the A500 had. And it shipped with 1MB of chip RAM, rather than 512KB. 1MB chip wasn't possible in the A500 without soldering IIRC. Some games utilised that, though bot many.

I think once the 1200 came out it was just an odd product in the lineup. The 1200 made way more sense given the massive upgrade across CPU, memory, chipset and OS

The 500 Plus had ECS and supported up to 2MB chip RAM without soldering (and shipped with Kickstart 2.04)

Ah true, good point. Forgot about the 500 Plus.

Yes though it was pretty easy to update the 500 to KS2.0. Just replace one chip that was already socketed. I think you could even reuse the original with an eprom burner.

I updated my A500 to kickstart 2.0 but I never did the 1mb chip RAM Agnus mod

Neither did I but the fast ram upgrade module was pretty good too.

It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0 The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard) Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that. The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting. Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.

I'd disagree. Chipset and architecture wise, there is not much that makes the A600 different from an A500. ECS is almost zero improvement over OCS for most use cases. Both are on the same old ~7mhz 68000 CPU, which was absolutely ancient by 1992 when the A600 was released. The A500 was a cost reduced A1000, and there is little real difference to the user (other than kickstart in ROM.)

If anything, the A600 is a downgrade because it's missing the Zorro expansion bus...

Exactly. Commodore made a mistake when they introduced it but I loved mine to bits! After owning it for about a year I upgraded it with a 68030 turbo (incl. 4 megs of fast mem, an FPU and an MMU) and a 4 gig IBM Travelstar HD. The upgrade made it one of the flakiest bits of computing hardware I've ever used (you'd be lucky to use it for an hour without it crashing) but it was just so frigging cool! I painted it pink and purple and labelled it "Sikakone" ("Pig machine" in Finnish).

That sounds awesome, do you have any pictures of your Sikakone?

Unfortunately not. It was quite the setup! The A600 had a built-in dock for a hard drive but the turbo took its place. I ran a long ATA cable through the PCMCIA slot and had the drive just sit on the table next to the computer. The turbo also ran extremely hot (it had a plastic cover that started to melt almost immediately so I took it off) which meant I couldn't keep the case closed. I propped it open by shoving a 3,5 inch floppy between the disk drive and the case and have it sit there completely vertically. This allowed for enough air flow to keep the thing from overheating too much. Good times!

Sure but none of those improvements had any sort of “wow” factor for the target audience - who were primarily interested in graphics, sound and CPU speed - particularly wrt to gaming. ECS is a marginal improvement, otherwise you’re still looking at 7 year old technology. What killed the Amiga as a mass market device in Europe IMHO were the new consoles - Megadrive and the like which blew it out of the water in terms of eye candy and speed.

But MegaDrive games don't look inherently better than OCS Amiga ones - and sound worse to boot. Compare Desert Strike or Battle Squadron which had a version for both systems. Maybe SNES was an improvement; the main advantage was the price of the system instead (and the hidden cost was that the games were 2x - 3x as expensive, which added up quickly).

ECS barely added anything for the average user. Almost nobody used the productivity or weird super-hires modes.

They could’ve skipped the A600 entirely and just left the A500 Plus on the market.

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