The Amiga 600 - about the hardware from the era thirty years ago

 About the hardware from the era thirty years ago

 Amiga 600

Release date: March, 1992 ( 31 years ago)

Introductory price: £399 or $499

Units sold: 193,000 in Germany plus 200,000 worldwide.

Discontinued: 1993

 

Amiga 600

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Amiga 600 was the last model with the Motorola 68000 procesor @7.16 MHz (NTSC)/ 7.09 MHz (PAL) and the 1990 Enhanced Chip Set. It had 1 MB of CHIP RAM 80 ns. 

It was the redesign of the Amiga 500 Plus (that model was from 1991). It added PCMCIA card slot and the option for internal HDD. Amiga 600 was lacking a numeric block, due to size limits. It was almost the size of the IMB PC keyboard. Weight 2.72 kg. It shipped with AmigaOS 2.0.

An A600HD model was sold with an internal 2.5" ATA hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 MB.

 

Due to the inclusion of Kickstart 2.05, many software titles made for A1000 or A500 do not work on the A600. A program - Relokick - was released which loaded a Kickstart 1.3 ROM image into memory and booted the machine into Kickstart 1.3. This allowed most incompatible software to run. Because Relokick itself occupies 512 KB of memory, some titles would not work unless the A600 was fitted with a 1 MB trapdoor memory expansion.

 

The ECS can adress up to 2 MB of CHIP RAM and adds higher resolution modes.

The Super Agnus display chip can drive screen modes varying from 320×200 pixels to 1280×512 pixels. As with the original Amiga chipset, up to 32 colors can be displayed from a 12-bit (4096 color) palette at lower display resolutions. An extra half-brite mode offers 64 simultaneous colors by allowing each of the 32 colors in the palette to be dimmed to half brightness. Additionally, a 4096-color HAM mode can be used at lower resolutions. At higher resolutions, such as 800×600i, only 4 simultaneous colors can be displayed.

Sound was unchanged from the original Amiga design, namely 4 DMA driven 8-bit channels, with two channels for the left speaker and two for the right.

The A600 was the first Amiga model with built-in color composite video (RCA), which allowed the A600 to be used with a standard CRT television without the need for a Modulator adaptor.