The Amiga 600 was one of the last Amigas, and it became a symbol of everything wrong with Commodore and the product line. Retro enthusiasts like it today because of its small size, so it’s the perfect retro Amiga for today. But it couldn’t have been much more wrong for the time it was introduced, March 11-18, 1992 at the CeBit show.
The Amiga 600 was a cost-reduced Amiga for home use, similar in size and appearance to a Commodore 64. But internally it wasn’t much more than a repackaged Amiga 1000 from 1985, trying to compete with VGA graphics and 386 CPUs.
Commodore didn’t understand its own success
The Amiga 600 shows how Commodore didn’t understand its previous successes and failures. When Commodore was at its best, the process looked something like this. It decided on a price point to hit. Then its engineers built the computer they would want while staying within that budget. Most of Commodore’s engineers were computer enthusiasts themselves, so it was like a car company selling cars designed by car enthusiasts.
The machines built momentum fairly quickly. Other enthusiasts took to the machines, built peripherals and software to go with it, and created an ecosystem that sold the computer. Commodore’s marketing rarely said much more than their computer was better and cheaper than the others. For a while, that was all it took.
What was wrong with the Amiga 600
The Amiga 600 was the opposite of all that. It was 1985 technology repackaged to look as much like 1982 technology as possible, priced at $500 and released in 1992. But that didn’t include a monitor and hard drive. You wanted those. By the time you added a monitor and a hard drive to get the system you really wanted, it cost closer to $1,000. At that price, you could get an off-brand PC with a VGA monitor. It wouldn’t be great. But it also didn’t feel like someone ripping you off with expensive add-ons. Or you could pay $200 more and get a pretty nice PC with lots of expansion capability. Either way you went, the PC seemed like a better value. And as 1992 wore on, that PC came down in price while Amiga prices held mostly steady.
The Amiga 600 failed, and Commodore discontinued it in 1993. No one noticed though. Commodore still had inventory when it folded in 1994 so you could still get one if you wanted one. They had refurbished Amiga 500s too, so you could get one of those instead. And that’s what the people in the know went for, if they bought an Amiga instead of a PC.
Amiga 600 vs Amiga 500
In most ways, the Amiga 600 was just a cut-down version of the Amiga 500. Launched in 1987, the Amiga 500 had been pretty successful. It initially cost $695 when released, and was also a cut-down version of the Amiga 1000, repackaged in a single piece with a full keyboard that resembled the now-ubiquitous PC keyboard layout of today.
An ecosystem sprung up around the Amiga 500 because it was really expandable. It featured a port on the side where you could plug in a hard drive or CD-ROM drive, and a trapdoor expansion that could take additional memory. If you were willing to tinker, you could expand it inside, because all of the major chips were in sockets. Lots of Amiga 500 add-0ns were circuit boards that plugged into chip sockets.
The Amiga 600 dispensed with most of that. All of the chips except the system ROM were soldered to the motherboard, so all the wonderful internal A500 expansions didn’t work anymore. The expansion port on the side disappeared, with a PCMCIA port in its place. That’s nice today, but in 1992, PCMCIA peripherals were fairly scarce. The keyboard shrunk down to something resembling today’s 40% keyboards. The only improvement it featured over the A500 was having a 44-pin IDE port on the motherboard.
It was fully software-compatible with the A500, but most of the peripherals that had sprung up around it over the previous five years had to be redesigned. It was a dated machine, with no hardware ecosystem around it, and offered no significant price savings over the machine it replaced.
The Amiga 300
At one point, the Amiga 600 was going to be called the Amiga 300 and sold as a cut-down Amiga. That sounds like a solution in charge of a problem but at least wouldn’t have meant discontinuing a machine tha
12 Comments
EvanAnderson
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
A4ET8a8uTh0_v2
Those complaints ring true. I had one and you ran into its limitations almost immediately, but that would not likely be an issue were it not for the fact that not everything was compatible between a500, a1200 and a600. But even that wasn't the biggest issue. The most amusing issue, in retrospect — I hated this as a kid, was lack of full keyboard, because, please try not to laugh, I could not play civilization properly since it had no numpad. It was years later before I could enjoy moving diagonally. Eh, to be a child again.
t0mek
The article doesn't mention the recent development in Amiga extension cards – PiStorm is an easy (and affordable) way to max out the specs of any Amiga, A600 included.
AnotherGoodName
The big issue was less technical and more market based. I remember in 92 you could easily get an Amiga 500 for under $500 that this sold for. People were upgrading and stores were doing clearances of old stock. So it competed with a flood of Amiga 500s.
wileydragonfly
My god, have you looked up the price of an Amiga on eBay in response to this thread? I did and it’s horrifying.
foft
If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more details.
It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.
It also has a reimplementation of the 680×0 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.
meling
I remember spending my whole years (part-time) work salary on an Amiga 4000 in 1993 or 94. I miss that computer. But man, my then girlfriend (now wife) was pretty horrified that I spent so much money on a computer… I don’t remember what other plans she had for my money, haha.
doener
Reddit discussions about the same article: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1jcrtct/amiga_600_th…
krige
I've had a stock A600 for over a decade, it was okay. Sure I had to run a ReloKick for some games but the OS was vastly superior to the awful blue-orange flat shading ugly 1.3 topaz font hell of A500. Sure A500+ existed but over here (central europe) it was very rare and it was missing the IDE port anyway.
Ironically for me the greatest issue was lack of the numpad, which caused issues with some software, and forced a very lasting aversion to numpad usage on me.
From today's perspective, A600 is… annoying, which I've found out a few years ago. The architecture choices are hard to work with: the PCMCIA slot limits the amount of memory you can work with (well, unless you don't want to use it but it's almost indispensable, esp. for data transfer), the internal bus only accepts "slow" RAM – the desired Fast RAM (CPU exclusive) can only be added by expansions put directly over the CPU itself. Sure, there are Vampires and PiStorms but the compatibility of both can be a bit spotty, and if you're dumping that much on the system you must love it specifically, lest you'd just go with an A1200 which is superior in every respect.
On that note, currently the easiest no-brainer Amiga to actually have fun with without eating your budget too much is an A1200. Slap an 8MB fast ram expansion, an IDE CF controller, and 3.2.2 OS/ROM it's ready to go. WHDLoad installs exist for every important game and many obscure ones too, data transfer can go either via PCMCIA>CF card, or a Parallel Port contraption that reads microSD cards. And if you want more power (though I can't imagine why, unless you want to run Doom on it), TerribleFire cards aren't too pricey. 128MB RAM + 030/060 CPU is a substantial boost (note: games, especially early 3D, will break with that much power).
Just watch for leaky capacitors (thankfully there's a whole industry for fixing this), and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore).
hdaz0017
I might be biased as the A600 was the first computer I bought with my own money, but there was no way I would have bought a 386SX over the A600.
This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games were there and the games were great to play, the first game I bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer, soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 – 100 games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I then bought a A1200 but it was not the same…
Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed there would be a release at some point.
Three words, plug and play!
I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an inch out )) lol
It showcased the A600 and the style of the machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so.
The A500, A600 and A1200 are all prone to discoloration….
I still have two A600's and one A1200 and all of them are still working, not bad for a computer that is 33 years old and took a battering for many years.
:)
nmstoker
Interesting.
Also, the article mentions the AGA chip with no introduction of it. Some sort of editing mix up?
whywhywhywhy
>A stock Amiga 600 can play a Commander Keen-style game just as smoothly as a faster PC.
Look… comparing Amiga platformers to Commander Keen is insulting. Amiga had "Genesis style games" not "Commander Keen style games"
Amiga games looked and sounded like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtLGDywZlg
Not this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKHUOKVzo0Q