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Comment by afro88 | Hacker News Reader

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

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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.

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.

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...

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.

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