Amiga 600: Difference between revisions
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According to [[Dave Haynie]], the A600 "was supposed to be {{nowrap|50 – 60 US$}} cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500."<ref name="haynie300">Haynie, Dave, [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc/browse_frm/thread/5764fad95e014a91/7d5c82eca35f0eb7?lnk=st "Re: Amiga CPU is similar to Mac CPU"], [[Usenet]] (comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc). Posted 4 November 2002, article retrieved from [[Google Groups]] archive on 9 November 2006.</ref> This is supported by the fact that the A600 was originally to have been numbered the A300, positioned as a budget version of the A500+. In the event, the cost led the machine to be marketed as a replacement for the A500+, requiring a change of number. Early models feature motherboards and power supplies with the A300 designation. |
According to [[Dave Haynie]], the A600 "was supposed to be {{nowrap|50 – 60 US$}} cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500."<ref name="haynie300">Haynie, Dave, [http://groups.google.com/group/comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc/browse_frm/thread/5764fad95e014a91/7d5c82eca35f0eb7?lnk=st "Re: Amiga CPU is similar to Mac CPU"], [[Usenet]] (comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc). Posted 4 November 2002, article retrieved from [[Google Groups]] archive on 9 November 2006.</ref> 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 and power supplies with the A300 designation. |
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The Managing Director of Commodore UK, |
The Managing Director of Commodore UK, David Pleasance, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up".<ref>Tim Smith and Chris Lloyd, "Chewing the Facts", ''[[Amiga Format]]'', Annual 1994, p 107.</ref> In comparison to the popular A500 it was considered unexpandable, did not improve on the A500's CPU, was more expensive, and lacked a numeric keypad meaning that some existing software such as [[flight simulator]]s and application software could not be used without a numerical pad emulator. |
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An "A600HD" model was sold with an internal 2.5" [[Parallel ATA|ATA]] hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 [[Megabyte|MB]]. This model was marketed as a more "scholarly" version of a home computer hitherto best known for its extensive range of games and retailed at almost double the price of a standard A600. However, this hard disk support introduced some incompatibility with existing Amiga software because the memory used for hard disk control prevented some memory intensive titles from launching without adding additional RAM. |
An "A600HD" model was sold with an internal 2.5" [[Parallel ATA|ATA]] hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 [[Megabyte|MB]]. This model was marketed as a more "scholarly" version of a home computer hitherto best known for its extensive range of games and retailed at almost double the price of a standard A600. However, this hard disk support introduced some incompatibility with existing Amiga software because the memory used for hard disk control prevented some memory intensive titles from launching without adding additional RAM. |
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Revision as of 23:31, 22 December 2010
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| Manufacturer | Commodore |
|---|---|
| Type | Home computer |
| Release date | March 1992 |
| Discontinued | 1993 |
| Operating system | AmigaOS 2.05 |
| CPU | Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz 7.09 MHz (PAL) |
| Memory | 1 MB (10 MB Maximum) |
| Predecessor | Amiga 500, Amiga 500 Plus |
| Successor | Amiga 1200 |
The Amiga 600, also known as the A600 (codenamed "June Bug" after a B-52s song), was a home computer introduced at the CeBIT show in March 1992. The A600 was the final model of the original A500-esque line based on the Motorola 68000 CPU and the ECS chipset. A notable aspect of the A600 was its small size. Lacking a numeric keypad, the A600 was only slightly larger than a standard PC keyboard - 14" long by 9.5" deep by 3" high and weighed approximately 6 pounds. AmigaOS 2.0 was included which was generally considered more user-friendly than AmigaOS 1.3.
Like the A500 before it, the A600 was aimed at the lower "consumer" end of the market, with the higher end being dominated by the Amiga 3000. It was essentially a redesign of the Amiga 500 Plus, with the option of an internal hard disk drive. It was intended by manufacturer Commodore International to revitalize sales of the A500 line before the introduction of the 32-bit Amiga 1200.
According to Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be 50 – 60 US$ cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive than the A500."[1] 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 and power supplies with the A300 designation.
The Managing Director of Commodore UK, David Pleasance, described the A600 as a "complete and utter screw-up".[2] In comparison to the popular A500 it was considered unexpandable, did not improve on the A500's CPU, was more expensive, and lacked a numeric keypad meaning that some existing software such as flight simulators and application software could not be used without a numerical pad emulator.
An "A600HD" model was sold with an internal 2.5" ATA hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 MB. This model was marketed as a more "scholarly" version of a home computer hitherto best known for its extensive range of games and retailed at almost double the price of a standard A600. However, this hard disk support introduced some incompatibility with existing Amiga software because the memory used for hard disk control prevented some memory intensive titles from launching without adding additional RAM.
The A600 was the first Amiga model manufactured in the UK. The factory was in Irvine, Scotland, although some later examples were manufactured in Hong Kong. The first ever production A600 — serial number "1" — resided in the Commodore UK Managing Director's office.
Surface-mount technology used on the A600 led to a failure rate under warranty of 0.78%, compared to the A500's failure rate of 8.25%.[citation needed]
Technical information
Processor and RAM
The A600 shipped with a Motorola 68000 CPU, running at 7.09 MHz (PAL) or 7.16 MHz (NTSC) and 1 MB "chip" RAM.
The original design did not intend for CPU upgrade as the 68000 was soldered to the motherboard and there was no other connection for upgrade. Despite this, unofficial CPU upgrades included the Motorola 68010, 68020 (at up to 25 MHz), and 68030 (at up to 50 MHz). The processor was upgraded not by replacing the 68000, but rather by fitting a connector over the CPU, which allowed the upgraded CPU to commandeer the system bus. However, this approach caused instability problems with some board designs prompting custom modifications for stable operation. As a result such CPU expansions were largely unpopular.[3]
RAM could be upgraded to a maximum of 2 MB "chip" RAM using the trapdoor expansion slot. An additional 4 MB of "fast" RAM could be added in the PC Card slot using a suitable SRAM card to realize the originally intended capacity of 6 MB. However, more "fast" RAM could be added with unofficial memory or CPU upgrades. For example, the A608 [4] board adds up to a maximum of 8 MB additional RAM by connecting over the original 68000. Likewise, CPU upgrades could accommodate up to 128 MB RAM.[5]
Graphics and sound
The Fat Agnus display chip drove screen modes varying from 320×200 pixels to 1280×512 pixels. Typically, only 32 colors could be displayed from a 12-bit (4,096 color) palette. An extra-half-bright mode offered 64 simultaneous colors by allowing each of the 32 colors in the palette to be dimmed to half its normal brightness. A memory-intensive 4,096 color "HAM" mode could be used at lower resolutions. At its highest resolutions, such as 800×600i, only 4 simultaneous colors could be displayed.
Sound was unchanged from the original Amiga design, namely, 4 channel, with two channels for the left speaker and two for the right. Resolution was 8 bit.
Peripherals and expansion
The A600 featured Amiga compatible connectors including two DB9M ports for joysticks, mice, and light pens, a standard 25-pin RS-232 serial port and a 25-pin Centronics parallel port. As a result, the A600 was compatible with many peripherals available for earlier Amiga models, such as MIDI interfaces, sound samplers and video digitizers.
Expansion capabilities new to the Amiga line were the PCMCIA Type II slot and the internal 44-pin ATA interface both most commonly seen on laptop computers. Both interfaces were controlled by the 'Gayle' custom chip.[6][7][8] The A600 has internal housing for one 2.5" internal hard disk drive connecting to the ATA controller.
The A600 was the first of only two Amiga models to feature a PCMCIA Type II interface. This connector allows use of a number of compatible peripherals available for the laptop market, though only 16-bit (Type II) PCMCIA cards are hardware compatible, newer 32-bit CardBus or PC Card peripherals are incompatible. The port is not fully compliant with the PCMCIA Type II standard as the A600 was developed before the standard was finalized. The PCMCIA implementation on the A600 is almost identical to the one featured on the later Amiga 1200. A number of Amiga peripherals were released by third-party developers for this connector including SRAM cards, CD-ROM controllers, SCSI controllers, network cards, sound samplers and video digitizers. Although PCMCIA was similar in spirit to Commodore's expansion architecture for its earlier systems, the intended capability for convenient external expansion through this connector was largely unrealized at the time of release because of the prohibitive expense of PCMCIA peripherals for a budget home computer.[9] Later, a number of compatible laptop peripherals have been made to operate with the A600 including wired and wireless network cards, serial modems and CompactFlash adaptors.
Operating system
The A600 was shipped with AmigaOS 2.0, consisting of Workbench 2.0 and a Kickstart ROM chip which was either revision 37.299, 37.300 or 37.350 (Commodore's internal revision numbers). Confusingly, all three ROMs were officially designated as version "2.05".
Early revisions of the A600 were shipped with Kickstart revision 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 A600 and especially the A600HD 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.
Later it was possible to buy an updated Workbench 2.1. It featured a localization of the operating system in several languages and had a "CrossDOS" driver which provided read/write support for FAT (MS-DOS) formatted media like floppy disks or hard drives. It was a pure software update. Kickstart ROMs designated as 2.1 never existed. Workbench 2.1 ran on all Kickstart ROMs of the 2.0x family.
Following release of AmigaOS 3.1 it was possible to upgrade the A600 by installing a compatible revision 40.xx Kickstart ROM.
Specifications
| Attribute | Specification |
|---|---|
| Processor | Motorola 68000 at 7.16 MHz (NTSC) or 7.09 MHz (PAL) |
| RAM |
1 MB Amiga Chip RAM; upgradeable by further 1 MB in "trapdoor" expansion slot |
| ROM | 512 kB Kickstart ROM |
| Chipset | Enhanced Chip Set (ECS)
|
| Removable storage | 3.5" DD floppy disk drive (880 kB capacity) |
| Internal Storage | 20 or 40 MB hard disk drive (A600HD model only) |
| Input/output ports |
Analogue RGB video out (DB23) |
| Expansion slots | 40-pin expansion slot for 1 MB RAM upgrade |
| Operating system | AmigaOS 2.0 (Kickstart 2.05/Workbench 2.05) |
| Physical dimensions | 350 × 240 ×75 mm (W × D × H) |
| Other | Built-in 78 key keyboard (without numeric keypad) |
Bundled software
Commodore sold the A600 together with a number of software bundles. All packs included at least a stock A600, mouse, power supply, and Workbench disks.
A600 packs:
- 'Lemmings' bundle (1992): Lemmings and the sophisticated-for-the-time Electronic Arts graphics package Deluxe Paint III.
- 'Robocop 3D' bundle (1992): Robocop 3D, Myth, Shadow of the Beast III, Graphic Workshop and Microtext
- 'Wild, Weird and Wicked' bundle (late 1992, £349 launch price): Formula One Grand Prix, Pushover, Putty and Deluxe Paint III
- A600HD 'Epic/Language' bundle (1992, £499 launch price): including internal 20 MB hard disk drive, a word processor, Trivial Pursuit, Myth, Rome and Epic.
See also
References
- ^ Haynie, Dave, "Re: Amiga CPU is similar to Mac CPU", Usenet (comp.sys.mac.hardware.misc). Posted 4 November 2002, article retrieved from Google Groups archive on 9 November 2006.
- ^ Tim Smith and Chris Lloyd, "Chewing the Facts", Amiga Format, Annual 1994, p 107.
- ^ "The Extreme Amiga 600 Upgrading Page - So how do you upgrade an Amiga 600?".
- ^ http://www.a608-amiga.co.uk/
- ^ "The Big Book of Amiga Hardware - Apollo 630".
- ^ "[[Commodore International|Commodore]] A600".
{{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help) 070726 amigahardware.mariomisic.de - ^ "Commodore A600 Rev 1.5 [[Motherboard]], Closeup ([[AT Attachment]], Modulator) - 1124[[Kilobyte|kB]]".
{{cite web}}: URL–wikilink conflict (help) 070726 amigahardware.mariomisic.de - ^ "Linux/drivers/ide/legacy/gayle.c". 070726 lxr.free-electrons.com, Source code of the Amiga 600 Gayle chip
- ^ "The Extreme Amiga 600 Upgrading Page - What the hell is an Amiga 600?".
!["Commodore A600 Rev 1.5 [[Motherboard]], Closeup ([[AT Attachment]], Modulator) - 1124[[Kilobyte|kB]]"](http://amigahardware.mariomisic.de/download_photos/a600mb_rev15_6.jpg){kind=link}
- Karl Foster (ed), "10 Totally Amazing Euro-Amiga Facts", Amiga Format, Annual 1993, p 55.