Unlike many, I love my Amiga 600. Always did, always will do. I even have three of them now. It's a nifty machine, very easily expanded and it has an excellent form factor especially if you wanna move it around.
Nowadays perception of this machine has shifted and it has become kind of a sought after model, which makes me both happy (justice for the underdog!) and sad (if any of my machines dies, I will have a hard time trying to replace it).
You can put a Vampire in it and turn it into the ultimate be-all-end-all Amiga, more power than any other machine ever had, but there's one thing preventing it from being a powerhouse machine, the ultimate Amiga:
THE
FUCKING
KEYBOARD
CONNECTOR
I cannot explain how fed up I am with these fucking keyboards. Whatever reason there is that makes A600 membrane flat ribbons fail a lot is beyond me, but that shit has to go. The blue membranes seem to be slightly more durable, but they could end up failing anyway. Like A1200 ones.
You can have the most kickass Amiga there is with your shiny new Vampire, clockport expansions, USB, Indivision, you name it. But that shitty fucking keyboard is gonna die on you and leave you looking like a moron when you are trying to demo your Vampire with Quake but a row of your fucking keys decided to die out of nowhere. Time to open that machine up, yeah! Now wiggle the fucking thing till the row works, awesome! Now another row doesn't work! Wiggle some more, now the spacebar is dead! Repeat until the gods smile on you and the planets have aligned, and it all works again! Oh joy, this is the happiest computer experience I ever had!!!
The only solutions we have, so far, are the VIA piggyback adapters but they are only for connecting USB or PS/2 keyboards externally. NO solution to replace the terribly bad internal keyboard and keep your A600 in its original form. Not optimal, but if you are towering that thing (why do you do this to yourself and the Amiga?), you are in luck.
So I
implore, beg, ask pretty please with sugar on top of the Amiga hardware gods, any of you beautiful wizards, stop for a second your accelerator development, and think how this problem could be fixed. A new membrane with a proper cable connector? A new membrane with a cable that piggybacks on the VIA? Anything. ANYTHING will be better, I can bet, than the shitjob Commodore put in A600s.
Thanks for reading this ramble/petition, and I hope someone decides to do the right thing, because I sure as hell cannot
