A600 - love it or hate it?

[FOL]

I love it, just like CD32. Noone will ever change my mind.

Originally Posted by alexh

I have often wondered two things about the A600

2) Why didn't the keyboard have HARDWARE numeric keypad support? Laptops had been in production for many years at this point. All without numeric keypads and they all had a modifier key which enabled alternate functions (i.e. hold down FUNCTION KEY and press 7 for 7 on numeric keypad)

If I recall, alot of games worked on A600 via alternate key combination to get numeric keys. I remember freaking out because I could not play shuttle on my new A600, until I read in the instructions you could do a certain key combo to get numeric keys.

[Mrs Beanbag]

anyone know if there are any alternate key combos for Damocles/Mercenary III? Because that was the first thing i got upset about.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Thorham

Yeah, but only because they don't support WASD (meynaf's Dungeon Master port supports it).

(or a lack of key rebinding)

Funny that you say that. I wonder what the first game was to actually use that scheme. On the PC it probably was Quake 1, but on the Amiga/Mac I can already think of the golden oldie Dark Castle that used it to do keyboard + mouse control. That Genius game designer was way ahead of his time.

[Mrs Beanbag]

it was Quake according to Wikipedia...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrow_..._movement_keys
ESDF predates it by a long way though, which is just WASD shifted right one key.

I remember Spectrum games using various configurations that separated horizontal from vertical, so you'd play two-handed.

[jack-3d]

Love it. A600 is the only good oldschool Amiga, small and easy to upgrade.

[supaduper]

Love. Love, love
so long as you get a good one where the caps aint leaked and you change them caps sharpish then there is no reason to not have a wonderful upgrade-able Amiga,
less is more

[lesta_smsc]

Love it. My first Amiga...

[kovacm]

Originally Posted by alexh

I have often wondered two things about the A600

1) How did it ever come to exist?

Let's think about the NRE (non recoverable expenditure) of making it?

• Most of the parts were "off the shelf" having been manufactured for years.
• The PCB design would have been cheap.
• The new SMT technology meant that PCB assembly would be considerably cheaper than A500+.
• The Gayle chip (replaced Gary) will have cost $$$$$$$ to design and manufacture
• The tooling to make the case & keyboard will have cost $$$$$$$.

There must be lots of things I don't know because on the face of it... it should never have existed.

somewhere in this video Dave Hayne explain why they made Amiga 600: [ Show youtube player ]

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by kovacm

somewhere in this video Dave Hayne explain why they made Amiga 600: [ Show youtube player ]

it starts at 37:11 if anyone doesn't want to have to watch the entire thing...

[desiv]

I don't know the specifics, but agree here...

Originally Posted by alexh

• Most of the parts were "off the shelf" having been manufactured for years.
• The PCB design would have been cheap.
• The new SMT technology meant that PCB assembly would be considerably cheaper than A500+.

All this sounds good...

Originally Posted by alexh

• The Gayle chip (replaced Gary) will have cost $$$$$$$ to design and manufacture
• The tooling to make the case & keyboard will have cost $$$$$$$.

I would think Gayle was really for the 1200, so not a huge loss there for this model specifically...
But..
If you can't release something like the A600 for less than the previous iterations, there's really no reason to release it..
If it would have really cost less, then it would have been a great machine for the time!
(I think it has turned out to be a great machine, but for the time, it missed. IMHO)

desiv
(p.s. I also think that the 1200 needed a faster CPU and easier FAST RAM upgrade/option on release. If that meant CBM lost money initially on both models, so be it. Lose a little early till the prices drop.. Easy for me to say tho.. ;-)

[mjnurney]

The Amiga 300 was suggested as a budget Amiga to catch the c64 owners at the time that had not upgraded yet.
The original idea was a basic budget machine for the european market to compete with the ST and could be upgraded later. However when the machine was released to Commodore UK it had pcmcia and Ide added at the request of the germans would not sell an Amiga without a hard drive.

So the cheap A300 became the A600 and it cost $50 more than the A500 to produce so the price was increased and so was the model number. The Amiga A500 is the only Amiga that was ever cancelled while still being in demand, where as the 600 never sold well and was not wanted by the customers.

The 600 is also the shortest lived Amiga as the 1200 became the budget model a few months later, with the 4000 being the top model.

The 600 / 300 was always intended as a cheap model so the 68000 was always specified for it. The 1200 was criticised at launch for being slow and not having fast ram.

mike.

[Zak]

How would I hate a Commodore Amiga?

When the A600 came out, I felt it to little enhancement to buy it though, and I was quite happy with my A500.
It was more to the end of the nineties when my brother showed up with an A600. We attached a harddisk to it and we bought some memory. The memory was configured as chip-memory though, so the A600 now had 2 meg of chip and no fast memory, which was a problem with many games.
Shortly after, the A600 died, because one of the custom chips had a problem. My brother decided, not to repair it and to go for the A500 again.

So it was a bit of an odd experience, but I like the design of the A600, it was like my older ZX spectrum + in a way, very compact, neat design.

[Khyron]

I remember you could get the A600 HD40 model around $600 at the time with 2MB..

a new A500 at the same time, going the cheapest route using an ADIDE and ADRAM + drive would put you closer to $800 for the same specs.. but you were limited to 1MB chip and KS1.3 was what the A500 came with..

Even putting them side by side as base models... $50 more for the base A600 got you an IDE controller and KS2.1/WB2.1 and the ability to expand to 2M..

For someone who just used the amiga as a game console.. the A500 makes sense.. anyone using productivity of any sort, or wanting an HD and more than 1mb of ram.. the A600 was a better deal.

[NovaCoder]

I hate it

To me it's the perfect statement about how screwed up things were in those final years at Commodore. It was meant to be a 'cut-price' A500 and then a replacement A500 and/or some kind of weird console competitor.

The actual specs were OK if it had been released a year earlier, then they could have released the A600 as an updated 'A500' instead of the A500+.

It needed a numerical keypad though to stop it looking 'less' of a computer than the A500. In fact they should have just stuck it in an A1200 case and sold if for the same price (or less) than the old A500.

And an 3.5" internal HD would have been a Nobel prize winning move

[DisposableHero]

Originally Posted by Khyron

I remember you could get the A600 HD40 model around $600 at the time with 2MB..

a new A500 at the same time, going the cheapest route using an ADIDE and ADRAM + drive would put you closer to $800 for the same specs.. but you were limited to 1MB chip and KS1.3 was what the A500 came with..

Even putting them side by side as base models... $50 more for the base A600 got you an IDE controller and KS2.1/WB2.1 and the ability to expand to 2M..

For someone who just used the amiga as a game console.. the A500 makes sense.. anyone using productivity of any sort, or wanting an HD and more than 1mb of ram.. the A600 was a better deal.

You mean productivity software like Deluxe Paint 3, where you couldn't use some of the main features without the numeric keypad? After all, who ever buys a computer to make full use of the program that comes with it? Or anything that was to slow with the 68000 you were locekd into?

And the A500+ came with Kickstart 2 and (like the A600 and older A500) could easily be expanded to 2Mb or beyond. A standard A500 could be upgraded to Kickstart 2 and ECS, though admittedly that was an added expense. But at least you weren't left with 3/4 of a slow Amiga no matter how much money you threw at it. You're wrong on almost every point about how ghastly and badly-executed an idea the A600 was.

[Predseda]

Originally Posted by DisposableHero

Or anything that was to slow with the 68000 you were locekd into?

I spent my childhood with my A600+1MB chip and Deluxe Paint IV I a was fully happy with it

[Paul_s]

I quite like the A600 form factor. For the gamer at the time it was pretty cool and allowed cheaper upgrades than previous counterparts.

Although I thought it showed the start of a decline in terms of build quality. 1000/500/2000/3000 were better made machines.

[Mrs Beanbag]

Originally Posted by DisposableHero

You mean productivity software like Deluxe Paint 3, where you couldn't use some of the main features without the numeric keypad?

i don't know about "main features", i hardly ever use the perspective tool. but it does seem like a bit of an oversight.

it would have been neat if it were possible to connect the numeric keypad externally, though.

[Leffmann]

Never had one, used to hate it, now love it.

Things like Kipper2K's fastmem expansions and PCMCIA network cards make the A600 a really neat machine. If I ever buy another Amiga, it will definitely be an A600.

[Mrs Beanbag]

we have 2 we don't use, £5 from car boot sales... one has German keyboard layout for some reason