Games - Amiga 600

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	Games - Amiga 600

The A600, also known as the Amiga
600 (codenamed "June Bug" after a B-52's song), was an Amiga personal computer launched in March 1992. The final model of the original A500-esque line based around the Motorola 68000 processor, it was essentially a repackaged A500+, intended by manufacturer Commodore International to revitalise sales of the A500 line before the more sophisticated A1200 became available.

A notable aspect of the A600 was its small size. Lacking a numeric keypad, the A600 was 14" long by 9.5" deep by 3" high and weighed approximately 6 pounds.

It came with the Kickstart/Workbench v2 AmigaOS and was generally considered more user-friendly than its older brethren. It was aimed at the lower "consumer" end of the market, with the higher end being dominated by the A3000.

According to Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be $50-$60 cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500." This is supported by the fact that the A600 was originally to have been numbered the A300, positioned as a budget version of the A500+. In the event, the cost led the machine to be marketed as a replacement for the A500+, requiring a change of number. Early models feature motherboards with the A300 designation.

The Managing Director of Commodore UK, David Pleasance, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up". It was unexpandable, did not improve on the A500's CPU, was more expensive than the A500, and lacked a numeric keypad, meaning that games such as Civilisation, Railroad Tycoon and productivity software could not be used without a numpad emulator.

The A600 was the first Amiga ever manufactured in the UK. The factory was in Irvine, Scotland. The first ever production A600 - serial number "1" - sat in the Commodore UK Managing Director's office.

It had a failure rate under warranty of 0.78%, much better than the A500's rate of 8.25%.

Processor and RAM

The A600 used the Motorola 68000 processor, running at 7.09 MHz (PAL) or 7.16 MHz (NTSC).

Standard RAM was 1 MB, though many people upgraded to the maximum of 2 MB "chip" RAM. An additional 4 MB of "fast" RAM could be added if the PCMCIA slot was employed. Even more "fast" RAM could be added with a processor upgrade.

The original design did not intend processor upgrades expansion as the 68000 was soldered to its motherboard. Despite this, unofficial processor upgrades included the Motorola 68010, 68020 (at up to 25 MHz), and 68030 (at up to 50 MHz) processors. Additionally, up to 32 MB of "fast" RAM could be added with some processor upgrades.

Graphics and sound

The Fat Agnus display chip drove screen modes varying from 320x200 pixels to 1280x512 pixels. Generally only 32 colours (or 64 "half tone") were available, although a memory-intensive 4096 colour "HAM" mode could be used at lower resolutions. At its highest resolutions, only 4 colours could be displayed at once.

Sound was 4 channel, 8-bit.

Peripherals and expansion

One 3.5" internal floppy drive was standard and a second could be added externally. Two DB9 ports for joysticks, mice, and lightpens were included, plus a standard 25-pin RS-232 serial port and 25-pin Centronics parallel port.

Other expansion connectors included the PCMCIA Type II slot and the internal IDE interface (for the 20 or 40 MB 2.5" disks — both high capacity and expensive for the time). The model with the integral IDE drives was sold - for almost double the price of a standard A600 - as the "A600HD", with a white rather than cream outer casing, and was marketed as a more "scholarly" version of a home computer hitherto best known for its extensive range of games. Some games, however, were used to using every last system resource available to the standard Amiga so, for example, to run some games such as Civilization from the Hard disk a memory expansion to take the available RAM higher than the standard 1MB was required.

Other add-ons included MIDI and samplers.

Operating System

The Amiga 600 was shipped with AmigaOS 2.0, consisting of Workbench 2.0 and a Kickstart ROM which was either version 37.299, 37.300 or 37.350 (Commodore's internal version numbers). Paradoxically, all three ROMs were officially designated as version "2.05".

Early revisions of the Amiga 600 were shipped with Kickstart version 37.299, which, to the surprise of some, neither had support for the internal ATA controller, nor for the PCMCIA interface. Although it was possible to load the necessary drivers from a floppy disk, it wasn't possible to boot directly from ATA or PCMCIA devices. Only later models of the Amiga 600 and especially the Amiga 600HD were equipped with Kickstart 37.300 or 37.350, which both were able to utilize those devices at boot time. Due to bugs in Kickstart 37.300, the maximum supported size of a hard drive was limited to 40 MB. Everything above this size was a game of chance. In contrast, version 37.350 was capable of supporting hard drives up to 4 GB.

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