The most detailed information about the Amiga A300?

[ImmortalA1000]

Every time I search for this it is nothing more than a tiny little bit about how the A600 started as the A300.

Trouble is I am not interested in the £399.99 A600. I want to know exactly what was going to be in the A300. Same case? RAM? Trapdoor expansion? etc etc. Perhaps the only difference is PCMCIA and internal IDE interface? Or perhaps the A300 and A600 are identical machines and only the price is different?

Also want to know what the actual intended RRP price was going to be, £199.99 or £249.99?

So really looking for as much info as possible up to the point it was abandoned and the A600 project came into existence, which I am not really interested in.

[grond]

From what I understood the A600 is the A300. Since they couldn't meet the originally intended price point, they thought they could make up for it by giving it a higher number. My last A600 said "A300" on the PCB.

[ImmortalA1000]

It's the often mentioned "couldn't meet the price point" bit that's intriguing, but does that mean the A300 and A600 are identical though. A 75-100% extra on top of the intended RRP seems more than just a slight miscalculation at Commodore if indeed the A300 motherboard prototype already had PCMCIA and IDE interface inside. OK PCMCIA didn't really take off on Amiga but in the laptop market all sorts of wonderful PCMCIA cards did appear like TV tuners, soundcards etc.

The other rumour was the A300 was meant to be a lower spec machine than the A500plus it replaced, but clearly the A600 is not a lower spec, it is a higher spec even if you have no interest in PCMCIA, ready to rock and roll IDE interface inside was an important upgrade to Amiga base model making it massively cheaper in the long run if you look at prices for side expansion A500 hard drive options. The harsh reality is 99% of A500 owners would never miss the numeric keypad IMO. 100% of £249.99 A500plus spec machine buying an A300 would never care about it as it was intended to be a rival to a 16bit console 'toy' purchase. Consoles are toys, product purchasing parents know that all a console will ever do is play games and cost the parents £50-65 a pop when their kid(s) get bored of generic platform rubbish #25643 on said console.

I could understand if it went from £250 to £300 or something, that's normal. To go from £250 to £400 is just a bit too much, the 520STFM didn't change more than 33% in price whilst the worldwide DRAM market collapsed on them in 1988. So I really want to know if the A300=A600 from a specs/features point of view.

Surely something must have been added to justify the £150-200 price increase apart from a new label on the case/box right?

(nothing wrong with the A600, I think it has it's place in history just as the A500plus does, that's not what this mystery busting thread is about for me btw).

[Amigajay]

Not sure where you are thinking it would have come out at £199 or £249, do you have any info for this? If i had to guess they would have tried to get it out at £299 which is more likely and realistic (was reduced to this price when the A1200 came out).

Maybe someone mis-quoted which was the norm back then of what they hoped to get it down to at some stage. Even the Amiga CD was talked up at being £199 in mid 1993, mags do kinda wish for too much i find!

I do like the codename ‘June Bug’ though!

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Amigajay

Not sure where you are thinking it would have come out at £199 or £249, do you have any info for this? If i had to guess they would have tried to get it out at £299 which is more likely and realistic (was reduced to this price when the A1200 came out).

Maybe someone mis-quoted which was the norm back then of what they hoped to get it down to at some stage. Even the Amiga CD was talked up at being £199 in mid 1993, mags do kinda wish for too much i find!

I do like the codename ‘June Bug’ though!

The price is from a magazine of the early 90s that I would have read at the time. Don't ask me what magazine it was as I bought so many in the ear;y 90s, those memories are long gone but it was £250ish price point, maybe it was £299.99. The figure of "£100 more than a console" is the memory that stuck with me and there were some £180ish bundles at the time.

£349.99 is nothing worth remembering or even mentioning vs £399.99 A600 RRP. It was definitely a significant price hike the article mentioned so £100 at least but I would like some confirmed info on it if it exists anywhere on the internet. I have done searches but nothing more than the June Bug prototype motherboard name is really standing out.

The feeling was one of missed opportunity going from A300 to A600 price in the article anyway.

[Megalomaniac]

I've always assumed that the IDE hard drive interface was added to the A600 when it changed from being a budget A300 to an A500-replacement. The inability to accelerate an A600, plus the missing keypad, inability add a CD drive or ROM-sharer for pre-Plus compatibility (which mattered then, though Relokick was a software solution later) surely offset the benefits of that for most users though?

I disagree about the missing keypad being trivial, flight sims and stuff like Railroad Tycoon and Pacific Islands had a big audience. If you look at sales charts from the immediate pre-A600 era a lot of games requiring (or greatly benefitting from) the keypad were selling well. Indeed a lot more than 1% of A500s were bundled with F-29 Retailator which needed it. Heck, you couldn't fully use Deluxe Paint 3 without it.

I've always wondered whether the stated intention for companies to release software on PCMCIA cards was ever based on any kind of practical thinking, or just marketing flim-flam. System 3 were planning in late 1991 to release Putty on a £60 cartridge plugging into the parallel port (so it'd work on all Amigas) but decided it wasn't cost-effective despite the impact on piracy, so would cards that A500 owners couldn't use have really been cheap enough to make to justify it? Ironic that Putty, once finished, was bundled with the A600 on floppy disks, I guess.

I never liked the A600 personally though, did anyone seriously go into a shop intending to buy a SNES and come out with an A600 instead? To me it alienated a lot more people than it attracted. Even if an A300 could have been launched for a price significantly lower than the existing A500+ to justify keeping both machines in development, I would have advised getting the A500+ instead.

[grond]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

It's the often mentioned "couldn't meet the price point" bit that's intriguing, but does that mean the A300 and A600 are identical though.

Yes, but it is at least highly likely that the A600 is the A300 (I never heard anything to the contrary). Like I said, at least the first A600 PCBs have "A300 June Bug" explicitly printed onto them. The A600 name only appears outside of the case.

The fact that the A300/600 became so much more expensive than originally intended was due to the new SMD technology which was a Commodore first and had promised lower production prices but ended up being much more expensive than originally expected. Pretty much every novelty of the A600 was based on the idea that the new manufacturing technology would allow Commodore to produce a cheaper and smaller A500 equivalent. Less PCB space, smaller case, reduced keyboard size, all these factors were expected to save money but didn't due to problems with the new manufacturing process. Of course, one can rightfully argue that the investments in SMD paid off later with the A1200 and the CD32 or that all the losses blamed on the A600 should in reality be equally distributed over the SMD models that followed it.

OK PCMCIA didn't really take off on Amiga but in the laptop market all sorts of wonderful PCMCIA cards did appear like TV tuners, soundcards etc.

I believe most of the more useful PCMCIA expansions really were PC-Card expansions, i.e. relied on the later 32 bit variant of the same form factor and can't be used in Amigas.

[Megalomaniac]

Fair point about the surface-mounted technology having long-term benefits - reliability was one, the A600 return rate was supposedly less than 1% compared with (from memory) about 8% on A500s and Pluses (which I think were perceived as being less reliable than STs, let alone consoles), and I'd imagine the A1200's was much the same.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by ImmortalA1000

The price is from a magazine of the early 90s that I would have read at the time. Don't ask me what magazine it was as I bought so many in the ear;y 90s, those memories are long gone but it was £250ish price point, maybe it was £299.99. The figure of "£100 more than a console" is the memory that stuck with me and there were some £180ish bundles at the time.

£349.99 is nothing worth remembering or even mentioning vs £399.99 A600 RRP. It was definitely a significant price hike the article mentioned so £100 at least but I would like some confirmed info on it if it exists anywhere on the internet. I have done searches but nothing more than the June Bug prototype motherboard name is really standing out.

The feeling was one of missed opportunity going from A300 to A600 price in the article anyway.

I vaguely remember (probably) the same article, but in all truth it was the magazines second guessing Commodore's pricing rather than anything they confirmed.


But realistically they wouldn't have made that price jump in one go even if they could have by price cutting, going from £400 to £200 even by Commodore's standards wouldn't make sense on a computer that sold a million units at £400 the year before.

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

I never liked the A600 personally though, did anyone seriously go into a shop intending to buy a SNES and come out with an A600 instead? To me it alienated a lot more people than it attracted. Even if an A300 could have been launched for a price significantly lower than the existing A500+ to justify keeping both machines in development, I would have advised getting the A500+ instead.

I don't think the A600 was aimed at people who had intentions of buying a SNES already and coming out with an Amiga! More aimed at people who wanted something to play games on but weren't quite sure what that was yet, yes the consoles could play games, but the Amiga could play games, and teach, had a keyboard etc etc



It only alienated imo Amiga fans (some of, others just laughed it off because of the lack of numpad). Imo it was a good decision if the naming and price (£299) was correct from launch (500+ or 500Mini as examples).

[Megalomaniac]

If the A600 wasn't intended to attract people who were otherwise looking at consoles, what was the purpose of it? The A500+ was already good technology, the A1200 was in development and on course to be the next-generation model, so what was the A600 as released ever intended to achieve? All the publicity on the A600's release talked of it as a console rival aimed at games players, but to me it didn't look or behave like a console, and didn't look like a proper 16-bit computer either. Even if Commodore had been able to publicly said "1% failure rate compared to 8% on the A500+" people would just assume they'd've been in the 92% anyway.

The A600 was potentially harmful to people who didn't own one as well - imagine how publishers and developers of many sims and strategy games (and some serious software) will have felt, having their existing hard work rendered incompatible through no fault of their own, and having to rework future titles in a way that compromised the experience of A600 owners (and, depending on the changes necessary, possibly of all Amiga users).

Maybe a truly budget A300, perhaps for £200 with no keypad and no IDE slot or other upgrade potential, could have been worthwhile, but not the A600.

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

If the A600 wasn't intended to attract people who were otherwise looking at consoles, what was the purpose of it? The A500+ was already good technology, the A1200 was in development and on course to be the next-generation model, so what was the A600 as released ever intended to achieve? All the publicity on the A600's release talked of it as a console rival aimed at games players, but to me it didn't look or behave like a console, and didn't look like a proper 16-bit computer either. Even if Commodore had been able to publicly said "1% failure rate compared to 8% on the A500+" people would just assume they'd've been in the 92% anyway.

The A600 was potentially harmful to people who didn't own one as well - imagine how publishers and developers of many sims and strategy games (and some serious software) will have felt, having their existing hard work rendered incompatible through no fault of their own, and having to rework future titles in a way that compromised the experience of A600 owners (and, depending on the changes necessary, possibly of all Amiga users).

Maybe a truly budget A300, perhaps for £200 with no keypad and no IDE slot or other upgrade potential, could have been worthwhile, but not the A600.

I never said it wasn't intended to sway people from consoles, you said if someone had the intention of buying a SNES. The difference is someone knows what they want and others that don't (yet) know, marketing played a lot bigger part in stores back then than it does now.


Most do their easy research online/youtube nowadays, back then it was mostly word of mouth or someone of someone who saw his mate have one kinda thing.


The A500+ was good tech sure, but it was 'basically' the same old tech as the A500, same look, same massive tv modulator sticking out the back, same big footprint. The A600(300) rectified these giving a much nicer look and size to put in-front of your TV that didn't require some sturdy furniture so it wouldn't collapse


But yes the numpad was a small issue, but as it was purely aimed at non-geeks as such and more casual gamers into Zool and Sensible Soccer it was a non-issue for most.



Certainly they could have made a numpad plug in accessory to negate the issue for everyone that is true. But then people would have compared oh you have to buy this as well, and it gets closer to the A1200 price which they wanted to keep a distance in price from, so i guess they couldn't win in that regard.


As i said above, it think the £200 price that was quoted probably a 'get to' price at some point down the line. The issue was the £399 price it did come out for, sure it cost Commodore extra R&D, issues with the tech which they didn't want to lose money on, and they pushed it out probably against some voices within the business, which at the end of the day it cost them alot more than money.

[grond]

Another reason why it's highly likely that the A300 was only rebranded to A600 is the presence of a new custom chip Gayle which includes the IDE functionality. Adding a new custom chip usually isn't a late decision in an R&D project as those need the most time to develop and test manufacture.

Looking at the giant size of the A500 the A300 did make sense. They just overdid it (size factor) and the lack of a meaningful upgrade path hurt the product a lot. Apart from the upgrade path and the missing number pad it offered more than the A500 did and promised a better margin. But all of this only made sense if you sold yourself on the old Commodore strategy of selling the same sort of thing for decreasing prices instead of maintaining the prices and selling more technology for that price over time.

[Megalomaniac]

The inbuilt modulator on the A600 was a nice improvement actually. But I'll reiterate that, as it was a replacement for the A500+ and the A1200 was six months away (and not easy to get hold of for the first few) there was a time when the A600 had to appeal to all potential Amiga owners (except those buying the professional versions), geeks or not.

Still, perhaps more relevantly to the original purpose of this thread, a theoretical A300 as a cheaper model alongside the A500+ would not have had this issue.

[alexh]

The A300 is the A600 isn't it? Early A600s have A300 silk screened on the motherboard.

Someone somewhere in CBM (quite rightly) questioned the wisdom of a number lower than A500.

If any magazine speculated on the price of the A300 it was just that pure speculation based on the number and it should be less than RRP of A500+

The intended RRP of the A300 must have been the same as the A600?

It wasn't pushed as a cost-reduced A500+ (although the A300/A600 should have been cheaper to produce than A500+ thanks to surface mount technology).

As a user, the integrated IDE HDD interface must have saved a few ££ over an A500 needing an external SCSI controller. But IIRC the price of 2.5" IDE HDD vs 3.5" SCSI HDDs negated the saving.

[alexh]

Originally Posted by grond

The fact that the A300/600 became so much more expensive than originally intended was due to the new SMD technology which was a Commodore first and had promised lower production prices but ended up being much more expensive than originally expected.

I can't believe for a second that is true. SMD technology was tried and tested around the world by this time. It will have saved them considerable manufacturing $$ vs A500+

If the A600 proved more expensive to bring to market it was due to one-off NRE costs (designing AA Gayle chip, tooling, pick-n-place machines) which would have been absorbed over time.

I think it more likely some bod in marketing decided the price not on production cost but what they thought they could get away with.

[Daedalus]

The A300 is reasonably well documented, and A300 is even printed on early A600 motherboards, which demonstrates how late in the development process the name got changed. So if you take an A300 motherboard as a representation, it's safe to say the A300 is the same as an A600.

The project's initial aim was to retail for $300, though the engineers thought $400 was more realistic.

While SMT was tried and tested, it was still relatively new ground for Commodore, and at the time SMT parts were slightly more expensive than their through-hole counterparts. So it was just a little bit too early for switching to SMT with the goal of saving money. Apparently the A600 BOM cost was only $10 less than the A500's at the time, so even without adding on the NREs mentioned it wasn't going to be the massive cost reduction over the A500 that they were looking for.

[grond]

Originally Posted by alexh

I can't believe for a second that is true. SMD technology was tried and tested around the world by this time. It will have saved them considerable manufacturing $$ vs A500+

If the A600 proved more expensive to bring to market it was due to one-off NRE costs (designing AA Gayle chip, tooling, pick-n-place machines) which would have been absorbed over time.

I think it more likely some bod in marketing decided the price not on production cost but what they thought they could get away with.

It's not that I really disagree with what you say (I pointed out that the investment into SMD manufacturing really can't be blamed on the A600). And even though I have no knowledge in the field, I would be very much surprised if Commodore was an early adopter of SMD technology. The name "A300" seems to be the strongest indicator that the model aimed at a lower price point than that of the A500+ which then couldn't be met (which is also a known fact, the A600's initial price was higher than that of its predecessor). The unknown connecting piece is whether they originally had intended to market the model at a lower price than that of the A500. I don't think Commodore would have sold the computer for less than they could get. Perhaps the whole story is more about potentially decreasing prices in the years to come which led to the strategic investment into SMD.

In any case it is true that what basically was an A500+ in a nicer case and with onboard IDE and PCMCIA of yet unknown value hardly deserved a model number below that of the A500 regardless of its intended price point. Thus, there is a good reason to assume that the name would have been changed to A600 even if the A600 hit exactly the originally intended price point (above that of the A500+). And we shouldn't forget that R&D often has internal names for the products they develop. I can easily see that a size-reduced A500 could be called an A300 while in development. Perhaps marketing / product management was slow in selecting the final number which is why the silk-screening from the last prototyped board remained in place for some time.

[alexh]

I don't think you can assume it was ever intended to be lower RRP than A500+ I would speculate the lower original number of A300 was intended to reflect it was physically smaller than A500+ rather than cheaper.

Then someone suggested a lower number might make the public think it should be either lower price or lower capability.

Ultimately the A600 was the correct number for its place in the Amiga lineup

[grond]

@alexh: you said it much shorter than I did.

[ImmortalA1000]

Originally Posted by Megalomaniac

If the A600 wasn't intended to attract people who were otherwise looking at consoles, what was the purpose of it? The A500+ was already good technology.....

Off topic but couldn't disagree more about ECS for a games orientated home computer in 1991-1992 for £400, ECS was a complete waste of time outside of the office environment A3000 + non interlaced monitor setup. For the £400 base spec Amiga user targeting the home gamer who now had the option of a SNES or Megadrive for peanuts worldwide it retained the 1985 spec of the A1000 in all areas that mattered for entertainment purposes. After 6 years during which time the console market sailed past with revolution on revolution technically for a half decade period, starting with the PC Engine in 1987. By 1991 the £400 Amiga compared badly to the Megadrive you had 15 colour parallax vs 61 colour quad parallax, NES quality Amiga ECS sprites vs most powerful sprites seen in history, awkward to program vs simple to program. No £400 OCS/ECS Amiga was ever going to dissuade any £150-180 SNES/MD predominantly games playing consumer. You have the added advantage that for the extra £20 for each game you don't get US Gold OutRun quality garbage and you get twice as much actual game in the case of Super Monaco GP.

Now at £249.99 when the SNES Mario/Superscope bundles were still not selling well in the EU in 1991 (until the SF2 bundle appeared it really was getting slaughtered by MD sales in the EU and then magically monthly console sales were pretty much identical) you definitely have a chance of capturing some of those new consumers going directly to consoles but at £400 you are not in the game, £100 more for a full computer running games like Lotus II, Sword of Sodan, Battle Squadron, Beast 1 etc you have a fighting chance to make some sales, they won't be record breaking without a proper chipset upgrade but it does make some sense because in the EU the idea of a family owning some sort of home computer just in case they might want to write a letter one day etc was still a thing. In the USA of course this was not a thing, you got an NES for the kids, Mom n Pop got an 8086 PC for everything else but Commodore were never going to make a big splash in the USA anyway.

Remember the A500 had been £399.99 since mid 1988, that's an eternity in 1980s home computer revolution after revolution advancement or ruthless price drops on unchanged spec hardware that was going on in the market. The first Archimedes in 1987 were only £150 more than the A500 and yet they had 800% colours per scanling, 300% CPU pushing power for flat shaded polygons and 200% the audio spec with software panning between left/right on any of the 8 channels. I remember in 1990/1991 Irving Gould was quoted in one of those weekly computer magazines that "7mhz 68000 is enough" and this is all tied together as the trouble Commodore had at the time of A500plus/A600 as very exciting things had already happened 12-24 months earlier in console hardware advancement beyond NES/SMS technical quality that even an Amiga 1000 can dismiss without breaking a sweat.

That is really why the price rumours are interesting to chase down. From what I remember the article(s) were pretty much saying the A300 was supposed to be launched significantly cheaper than the A500 model it replaced to fend off the console sales taking away from the 16bit home computer sales whilst they worked on a true successor to the A500 £400 machine, hence all the cost cutting of A300/600 (smaller case, no numeric pad, SMT motherboards, few chips on the board etc) this is all classic cost cutting, so I was interested to know why the cost never fell and if PCMCIA and IDE of A600 were additions to the 'cost reducted' A300 product they were working towards. At something like £100 more than a Megadrive/SNES in those early days of 16bit console launches in the EU it does give you a chance to keep the format alive. I was hoping maybe at some point a Commodore engineer had gone on record and talked to a magazine about the A300 and how it became the A600 and what had happened and what extra features, if any, were added. If it is identical (IDE, PCMCIA on A300 spec sheet) to the A600 also why there was such an increase and the cost reduced replacement for A500plus was not actually cheaper.

Because I can't remember which magazine(s) did such an article I can't tell you if it was one primarily focussed on games or something like CCI/CU Amiga etc. The article would not have been worded like that if the values involved were just a £50 price rise from £349.99 is my feeling. So then you have to wonder why they would say that if they had no actual figures they could corroborate for A300 intended RRP etc. Which naturally leads you onto asking what actually happened and is it an engineering, financial or marketing/press office issue.

I never doubted that the A300 became the A600, just trying to find the truth about what the A300 was (PCMCIA, IDE, same consolidated reduced chip count chipset on the same motherboard) and what, if anything, the A600 added to the party. and what the price point could have been vs why it was a cost reduced model that didn't actually lower the price of getting into Amiga ownership by the time it turned up in the shops. I don't know if the A300/600 could ever be mass produced for £249.99 RRP or (£125-150 cost to distributors if it goes by the method the C64 was pushed out so cheap in the earlier days) because Commodore had financial limits on how much they could invest up front in the scale of manufacture.

All I know is a £400 computer playing A500 quality games costing £30 in 1991 is not going to fend of sales of SNES/MD consoles. People will happily save £250 on the initial purchase price of hardware and pay £20 more per games just so they get Megadrive quality OutRun or SF2 Championship Edition (better than the SNES versions). At £249.99 potential purchasers may have put more effort into finding unrecognised rip-offs of arcade conversions they wanted to play (Lotus vs Turbo Outrun etc) That's really why I am interested.

Whether the £249.99 A300 is as much of a myth as the £499.99 4mb A1200CD or CD64 console with Hombre chipset for 1995 timeframe I don't know, hence I am reaching out to anybody who might remember reading the sort of articles I read around this time. I don't have the answers, only many many questions.

I do like the A600, adding an IDE interface to the base model machine is the only decent addition Commodore made to the Los Gatos Lorraine prototype hardware IMO. Sure you couldn't stick a 68030 into the 68000 CPU socket/Zorro side expansion like you could with the A500 but the reality is that is a tiny fraction of users who bought an A500/500plus who actually did that in the grand scheme of things so it's a fair trade.

Don't forget there were PCMCIA sound cards, you can't improve the audio hardware of an A500, you need an expensive Zorro-II Sunrise card to do that so in those optimistic naïve days it could have been thought possible to upgrade ECS/AGA sound hardware for the A600/1200 via this route or write drivers for existing cards. PCMCIA is not useless, nobody bothered to write Amiga drivers for the cool PCMCIA cards out there that's all It's a fair trade , just a shame the price of getting into Amiga ownership never officially fell below £400 etc (excluding stock dumping etc of old discontinued Amiga models/bundle from mail order/high street retailers).