The Amiga has a lot of fans, and rightly so. The machine broke a lot of ground. However, according to [Dave Farquhar], one of the most popular models today — the Amiga 600 — was reviled in 1992 by just about everyone. One of the last Amigas, it was supposed to be a low-cost home computer but was really just a repackaged Amiga 1000, a machine already seven years old which, at the time, might as well have been decades. The industry was moving at lightspeed back then.
[Dave] takes a look at how Commodore succeeded and then lost their way by the time the 600 rolled out. Keep in mind that low-cost was a relative term. A $500 price tag was higher than it seems today and even at that price, you had no monitor or hard drive. So at a $1,000 for a practical system you might as well go for a PC which was taking off at the same time.
By the time Commodore closed down, they had plenty of 600s left, but they also had refurbished 500s, and for many, that was the better deal. It was similar to the 500 but had more features, like an external port and easy memory expansion. Of course, both machines used the Motorola 68000. While that CPU has a lot of great features, by 1992, the writing was on the wall that the Intel silicon would win.
Perhaps the biggest issue, though, was the graphics system. The original Amiga outclassed nearly everything at the time. But, again, the industry was moving fast. The 600 wasn’t that impressive compared to a VGA. And, as [Dave] points out, it couldn’t run DOOM.
There’s more to the post. Be sure to check it out. It is a great look into the history of the last of a great line of machines. Maybe if Commodore had embraced PC interfaces, but we’ll never know. [Dave’s] take on the end of the Amiga echos others we’ve read. It wasn’t exactly Doom that killed the Amiga. It was more complicated than that. But Doom would have helped.
Wasn’t the A600/A1200 the stupid idea of Commodore USA?
Here in Germany, by early 90s, users rather wanted more A500s and some new A2000s insteads.
But no one was listening for some reason, and instead those doorstoppers were made, with their semi useless PCMCIA slots.
Even the C64 sold well at the time, also in parts thanks to re-union and former East Germans who wanted Commodore machines since the 80s.
Speaking under correction, though, I’m just a layman here. :)
A600 was originally the A300 that was requested by commodore UK, because they were still selling commodore 64s and a cheaper Amiga that could be upgraded would be a good thing. I think it would have been keyboardless and priceless, with games on cartridge.
But it turned into the A600 because they had a CTO that was from the PC industry. So it has built in IDE and PCMCIA. It ended up costing more than the A500+. I like the A600 but it was the wrong product
The A1200 on the other hand, was another George R Robbins design (like the a500 and cd32) and was pretty good. It would have been better if AGA hadn’t been mishandled by commodore management.
The 600 was a dumb idea, yeah. Not so much the 1200. The Games industry still made the C= market a lot of money, and kept the platform somewhat relevant to the average consumer, while video work was the primary business pursuit. But both ends were moving on to PCs, and to some extent, Macs.
The problems with the 600 were:
1: launched in the same year as AGA.. and everyone wanted AGA
2: Was supposed to be a massively cost reduced 500. But they couldn’t cut costs as much as they had planned, and it ended up costing MORE than the market would pay
3: C= still had lots of 500 stock (both new and refurbished), dumped into the market ahead of the 600 launch, cutting their own sales potential.
4: if you were only interested in the Amiga market as a games machine by this point, the anticipation for the CD32 certainly would have held you off from buying a far less capable 600. The AGA launch represented new potential for the Amiga market. So as a either a developer or player, you would be wanting to wait for AGA.
The reason I say the 1200 wasnt particularly stupid is because C= was still operating under this legacy marketing plan of “wedge” cases for low cost home use. I.E. gaming and casual computing. And big boxes for professional/productivity markets. The concept served them well throughout the entire history of C= so it made sense.
The problem is that by the end, the consumer market had settled on the PC. Enough technical innovation had come along to surpass the old model of closed architecture “brand computing” where there was no cross compatibility and innovation (while often advanced at launch) was slow to update. You are stuck with this hardware and performance for a decade. This model still holds (but barely hangs on) in the console market. As a consumer, you have to start over every few years with the new console launch and buying new games (often rehashed “updates” of previous titles). Consumers preferred the constant and consistent availability of affordable incremental hardware upgrades over time, rather than being frozen in time until they could afford a whole new system.
And now upgradeability is gone for the mainstream anyway. How incrementally upgradeable are macs or any laptop? I suppose it helps that hardware features are quite well defined at this point, even the lowest end devices come with everything included, everything is plenty fast, etc. a device is guaranteed good for years and years and by the time you upgrade you just get a new one.
The incrementally upgradeable PC concept is very much a feature of the time. Although admittedly that time lasted decades. Sure it still exists as a thing, but is a niche.
Back then for sure. Nowadays even a 10 years old laptop still serves me well unless MS kills the OS.
The a1200 was ok, except for the absolutely moronic 24 bit address bus. The expansion connector even has the missing bits defined, but putting a 68ec020 in there, which meant that you couldn’t both use pcmcia and add fastram at the same time was really something else.
I always wanted an amiga 600 only when I had somewhere to buy it and to be honest I had no money. What should I buy it with but I still want one now… I have a 500 at home that I need to restore
the 3000 was the one I regretted my dad buying me. video toaster didn’t work on it.. the a2000 was what I envied back in … was it ’92?
Yeah the 2k big boy had a lot of room. nothing beat it for expansion until the tower cases. The 3k and 4k cases are so cramped and a pain to work on / disassemble.
I have an Amiga A3000 that I installed both a video toaster and an Asquared Amiga live into. Five minutes with some tin snips was all it took. The A3000 was vastly superior to the A2000.
Haven’t powered it up in 15 years or so after a move.
Before you start it makes sure that your battery was not leaking, could have damage alot in 15 years. I know, my a3000 did not survive that.
The Amiga 600 was nothing like the Amiga 1000.
I accidentally didn’t write the rest of my comment which was the Amiga 600 is like the Amiga 1200. Whereas the Amiga 1000 is like the Amiga 500. I I’m surprised the article writer made a hash of these basic Amiga facts.
how can the 1000 “be like” the 500, when the 1000 was the first Amiga (before it even had the number 1000)?!?!
C= numbering scheme may make it hard for some people to remember the order, but its
Amiga (later rebranded Amiga 1000) -> A2000 -> A500 -> A3000 -> (all in 1992): A600, A1200 & A4000.
The 1000, 2000, 500, 3000, 600 and CDTV are all OCS/ECS machines, with the 1200, 4000 and CD32 are AGA.
So, you could say that the 500, 3000, 600 and CDTV are “like” the 1000, with some minor enhancements, but not the other way around.
And you certainly cant say the 600 is “like” the 1200. I mean, cosmetically, sure. but then you’d have to include the 500 (they are all “wedge” cases). Or both the 600 and 1200 had PCMCIA slots.. but that’s a minor technical comparison. The thing is, the 600 and 1200 are very different graphics chips, and the Amiga community draws a pretty strong line between OCS/ECS and AGA.
(follow up): So, you could say that the 600 is far closer to the 1000 (in technical capabilities) than it is to the 1200.
More to the point: The 1k, 2k, 500 and 600 all ran an M68000 at 7.16mhz and 512k or 1MB of RAM, and the OCS/ECS chipset. Just remixes of the same machine.
While the 1200 ran an M68020 at 14.32mhz, 2MB or RAM, and the AGA chipset.
The good thing about the A600 compared to the latest A500+ released before it was… Absolutely nothing whatsoever!!!
Has anyone actually got anything positive to answer this question with? Because I can’t find one!!!
At the time… the built in IDE, extra memory support, and space savings is about it. Nowadays the PCMCIA slot is nice to have but at the time it was pretty useless. Depending on your usecase being guaranteed to have the full ECS chipset (rather than mix and match ECS-OCS) was an advantage back in the day, but that was rather niche and again is mainly nice nowadays.
-Compact Size
-AGA hipset (flicker-free 640-480 Display built in, not a “flicker-fixer” upgrade, HAM mode – which at NTSC resolution was visually comparable to a 24 bit display for real-world images that had repeated pixels of the same color in the image)
-Built in hard drive controller so upgrading to a hard drive meant just buying an inexpensive IDE drive not a SCSI controller (more expensive than the drive) and a more expensive SCSI drive.
The 600s were great as the core of a touchscreen kiosk running AmigaVision.
Correction… ECS… still the productivity mode with flicker-free display was key, and that HDD support built in were huge for the “low end” model.
SpaceCoastGhost that would be A1200, and still not entirely:
– You still had to have multisync monitor, there was no way of transparently enforcing scan doubling on legacy modes. AGA booted in 15KHz, old games forced 15KHz. In 1992 14 inch color 15KHz monitor was ~$200, VGA monitor $200, oldest crappiest multisync monitor started at $400 (NEC 2A) while good models were $600 and up.
– HAM-8 is still only for static images. You couldnt even paint in this mode, cpu was too weak to keep up with re-encoding into HAM on the fly.
– IDE interface. HDD controller is on the HDD. IDE interface itself can be implemented using two cheap ICs on any Amiga. Including one on A500 to begin with was a huge mistake, it wouldnt cost them anything.
Blitting fillrate unchanged from 1985
sound unchanged from 1985
floppy unchanged from 1985
still no standard memory sockets for ram expansion.
and that was the “good one” A1200, compared to that ECS A600 was a trash fire. When A12000 was released you could have paid $200 extra to get 386 with 4MB ram and VGA. Another $200 got you standard 80-120MB HDD.
The 1200 was a very good machine but it could have done with being released at least 18 or 24 months earlier for Commodore to have made a good chance of success with it. As a 68000 developer on the Amiga back in the day it had a lot of hidden improvements that only developers are aware of which could have really pushed the machine especially the much improved DMA channels which general end users wouldn’t really have any thought about.. It’s absolutely crazy how Commodore totally screwed themselves up when they had such an advanced investment under their control other computer manufacturers with half a business brain would have easily made the Amiga into a continuous success story having a machine so far ahead of its time back then!!!
Amiga was way ahead of it’s time. Windows three on a pc looked like a penny farthing compared to the mountain bike of the a500. It’s only that memory got so cheap that the pc took the market a system running on top of dos could never beat a graphics chip. Look at what an amiga could do with a tiny bit of RAM.
Tbh even the Atari ST line was in some ways ahead of it’s time compared to the PCs of the day. And had niches where it even excelled against the (objectively) generally superior Amiga. Even ignoring their popularity in music the slightly faster CPU, monochrome “high-res” mode, the monitors that supported it (they were damned nice), and font support pretty much made them the standard machine for DTP in some markets, often working alongside Amigas for artwork. Take those points and add an FPU and they were great for the “we can’t justify a specialist UNIX workstation” CAD segment. We even found them brilliant dev machines for making stuff for the Amiga and other 68k platforms.
Tbh as much as it’s more convenient nowadays I sort of miss machines being so diverse.
Truth be told, entire Amiga series was a bad idea. PCMR folks had an open architecture, could upgrade and both software and hardware development was done by people all over the world. Some ideas were great, some failed but variety is what finally gave us Doom, Quake, Crysis and CoD. And note that in 20 years we went from Windows XP with its cartoon colors to Windows 10. Meanwhile Amiga UI always looked like an arse.
Meanwhile Amiga was design by group of dudes with a “vision” where criticism of their ideas meant your fired. World was moving forward and they still thought that strapping a bunch of expensive ASICs to an underpowered 68k CPU is the way to do gaming 😂 Sorry my friend but you lost before you even stared, Intel’s gamer CPU is now 24 core beast with 3,2 GHz (6,0 GHz turbo) clock while 68k is dead as dodo.
how old are you?
XP being the base for windows comparisons should hint at that.
uuuh… “Truth be told” indeed. Maybe if you are a 15 year old “gamer”…
If you totally ignore the timeline and realistic asseessmeent of the exponential advances in computer technology, you might put it like that.
But: When the Amiga came out, the PC hat 8 colors and beep-boop-beep sound. And that ent on to be that way for quite some time. Mentioning even Windows XP in this context is totally nonsensical….
About “Strapping on a bunch of expensive ASICs to an underpowered CPU”: What wwould you call all the graphics and soundcards back then (and even now?)
In the end, business people, not engineers, decided the fate of the Amiga.
Ahem. After CGA, the IBM PC had 16 colors on screen on Tandy/EGA and Plantronics ColorPlus (many CGA chips had hidden Plantronics functionality).
Except we’re talking about Sanyo MBC 550/555, an MS-DOS compatible, which indeed had 640×200 in 8 colors.
Or the Tandy 2000, which had 640×400 in 8 colors.
In the US, the PC Junior and Tandy 1000 line were popular IBM PC compatibles with 3 channel sound and 16 colors.
And they all did pre-date the Atari ST 520 and Amiga 1000.
Here in Europe, the Amstrad/Schneider PC1512 had proprietary 640×200 16c graphics, too.
It was very popular from 1986 onwards, along with its sibling, the PC1640 (EGA graphics).
EGA was interesting in so far that it had a soft font feature.
The text characters in memory could be altered, like with a Hercules Plus board.
It also had features like multiple screen pages, which could be used for double buffering.
There also was a vertical retrace interrupt on IRQ2, which was optional on VGA cards
If an EGA monitor was attached, up to 64 colors were available (4 palettes, 16 colors each).
Some games did change palette on the fly, giving the illusion of more than 16 colors at once.
If a multisync monitor was attached, many third-party EGA boards could display 640×480 16c or 800×600 16c.
Way back in 1985/1986, when the Amiga was just hatching out of its egg.
EGA compatibles such as ATI EGA Wonder did provide VGA BIOS compatibility in 1987.
They couldn’t do mode 13h in 320×200 256c, but normal VGA in 640×480 16c and 640×480 mono.
That was the standard VGA in applications (not games) at the games.
All way back in 1987.
early all if not all third-party EGA/VGA cards had 256KB of video memory as a basis.
VGA had been cloned and was very affordable from day 1!
It wasn’t like original IBM EGA from 1984, which was very expensive at time of introduction.
The Paradise PVGA1A from 1988 had an 640×400 256 color mode that worked with 256KB of video memory.
That 256c mode had driver support for software such as Autodesk software (ADI drivers), P-CAD ?, GEM, Windows 2 etc and later Windows 3.x.
All in the “golden days” of the Amiga.
By late 87/early 88 VGA cards came in low-end, medium-end and high-end versions.
8-Bit PC/XT cards were sold, as well.
CGA colors gave you cancer. EGA wasnt much better, still in 8-bit home computer territory.
Cheap Amigas didnt have many colors, but they did 12bit palette.
Off by 4 years.
1988 December cheapest VGA 256KB 8-bit $220, EGA $170. Cheapest VGA monitor $450, EGA ones $100 cheaper.
1990 EGA $100, VGA 256KB 8-bit $130, 512KB 16-bit VGA $200. Cheapest VGA card + color monitor combo ~$450.
1991 low end VGA $100. This is the moment EGA stopped making sense, cards cost the same, monitors cost the same.
By end of 1992 finally went down to $50, price ceiling for entry level video cards.
“Off by 4 years.” Certainly not.
I think different. VGA was a success early on, it didn’t take years to be adopted.
PC users were so happy about VGA, it was a savior to them.
Previously, they were stuck to Hercules or EGA, which either had crisp text ir 16 colors but not both.
Adoption rather had to be measured in months, thus.
By late 1987, ATI EGA Wonder and ATI V.I.P. were released. Based on EGA designs.
They already supported 640×480 16c and hi-res VGA text-modes.
One of my older 286 PCs assembled in 1988 had an 8-Bit ATI VGA Wonder (256KB) directly soldered to the motherboard.
Home comes, if VGA truely was such a luxury? Hm?
About money.. It makes no sense to discuss on that level.
Every country was different, and the people were different too.
That being said, a VGA card wasn’t much more expensive than any other PC accessory , such as a laser printer, modem hard disk.
But yeah, if we think in price ranges of an Atari 2600 or NES, then a VGA card was a huge investment.
But PC users didn’t see their PC as a game console with a keyboard. A500 users maybe did.
So if I did compare my 286 with VGA and hard disk to a Super Nintendo with a game copier station, then I would perhaps come to a different conclusion.
So it’s really hard to find rational arguments.
As a PC user I likely see it from a different angle.
Sometimes I wonder if Amiga users seriously think that VGA was
common from 1994 onwards when everyone had a 486 Big Tower AT and was playing Doom or Wolf 3D (I ‘hated’ them).
Last but not least: Monitors.
Early VGA monitors in 13″ or 14″ were rather TV grade in terms of quality.
They had a blurry picture, very different to a 350 line EGA monitor with digital RGB.
Early 31,5 KHz fixed-frequency VGA monitors were much cheaper than professional multisync monitors, in short.
To Amiga users who had a scan-doubler/flicker-fixer, VGA monitors were a very affordable alternative to professional 31,5 KHz monitors.
“1991 low end VGA $100. This is the moment EGA stopped making sense, cards cost the same, monitors cost the same.
By end of 1992 finally went down to $50, price ceiling for entry level video cards.”
Hi, I think that’s a bit of an US phenomenon.
European PC users sort of had skipped EGA in favor of VGA.
EGA never was that big over here, except on the software side (PC software was international).
Here, the IBM PC arrived just shortly before EGA, making users being hesitated to upgrade that soon.
There surely had been EGA setups, too, but apparently few home users had EGA monitors (sigh).
If they had EGA cards by the time, then with their digital RGB monitors being limited to 200 lines (or using interlacing).
Cheap Commodore monitors, I suppose. 1084 etc.
And poor CGA users probably couldn’t even afford a basic CGA monitor to begin with.
They had used CGA composite output and an ordinary, monochrome video monitor.
Which EGA cards couldn’t drive (except for a few models).
So EGA buying cards made no sense to them – unlike VGA, which later on was considered worth the upgrading.
The jump in graphics fidelity and high compatibility was appealing enough to consider investing in a new monitor standard.
It also solved the EGA problem – all VGA setups could display full range of EGA resolutions finally.
In the 90s, EGA video modes were seen as being a part of VGA rather than being independent.
As a true EGA PC, the Amstrad PC1640 with ECD monitor comes to mind (350 line EGA).
But many PC1640 users maybe opted for a cheaper monitor model also (mono or CGA).
Oh well, EGA is such a mystery. Who really knows the dark figure?
I took my prices from both US and Polish magazines.
$400 and $450, almost whole price of A500 on release.
Yes, 48 months :)
No country had lower prices than what manufacturers charged. If money is no object why not compare to Sun-3/470GXP with 3D accelerated 24-bit 1Megapixel graphics?
Yes, statistically up to ~1990 PC was a spread sheet calculator connected to MDA/Hercules display. 99% of PC purchases were for businesses use.
In 1988 286 with VGA and hard disk would cost >$2500. In 1991-2 it would be ~$1000, $600 base unit (price of A1200) + $200 HDD + $200 monitor.
Even PC games didnt take advantage until 1989 (688 Attack Sub). Earlier games mostly display 16 colors in VGA 320×200 mode with occasional splash screen with some more colors. Up to 1990 PC games were predominantly EGA/Amiga ports.
“Yes, statistically up to ~1990 PC was a spread sheet calculator connected to MDA/Hercules display. 99% of PC purchases were for businesses use.”
You forgot about the few pro gamers in 1989/1990 running MS Flight Simulator 4 in S/VGA on an 386 compatible with an ET-4000, a 20″ CRT monitor and a flight joystick (yoke).
Such people had existed, too. The PC was great for all kinds of simulation software. :)
To be fair, there also were Turbo XT users in 1986-1990 who were very money oriented.
Their ~10 MHz V20 PCs were like “a poor man’s” 286 PC.
If they were into games, an non-name AdLib compatible music card and an 8-Bit (base model) VGA card was among their priorities for sure.
Many games supporting sound cards were the VGA versions or VGA re-released.
Both VGA and AdLib (and CMS) were from 1987.
As for EGA games.. Since roughly 1986, PC games not seldomly shipped with the game on two kind of floppies inside the game box.
A CGA diskette and an EGA diskette.
Often, the CGA version also had poor Hercules compatibility built-in.
Both Hercules and CGA had used same Motorola CRTC chip.
However, this has nothing to do with adoption of VGA as such.
As I said before, VGA was like a godsent to PC users. :)
It finally made working with PCs an experience that didn’t hurt.
I mean, VGA still is being “a thing” to this very day. It’s impact was huge, thus.
I suppose we could discuss endlessly when exactly PC gamers got The VGA Experience™, though, maybe.
PC platform wasn’t as uniform as Amiga or Atari ST, after all.
Just one thing is for sure: To those who wanted VGA, it was available way back in 1987/1988 already. Money or not.
obvious troll is obvious.
popcorn
“Truth be told, entire Amiga series was a bad idea.”
Not at the time. Atari and Commodore 8-bits, following by their MC68000 machines provided much more for the price than early x86 PCs. However, for the reasons well described above by mre, that came to an end.
To be fair, the 68000 was slow in comparison to an 80286.
It’s a relic of the 70s and should have been replaced by 68020 or 68010 when the Amiga was launched in 1985.
Just like the intel 8088 had been superseded by NEC V20 on PC in mid-80s!
The 68010 supported an MMU and had a tiny instruction cache (buffer) that made quite some difference.
The Amiga port of the game StarFlight needed an 68030 to come close to the PC version (8088/8086).
https://tinyurl.com/2s49jpcc
This might be caused by bad programming, but also shows how much of a bottleneck the 68000 was to the Amiga!
It wasn’t just the OCS/ECS chipset that was aged. The 68000 was obsolete, too.
By 1987, the Amiga 2000 still sold with an 8 MHz 68000 but had a CPU upgrade slot intended for an 68030 card (but also compatible with 68020 to 68060 cards).
That made sense, because Commodore knew that the 68000 was outdated.
With a CPU card the A2000 got be turned into something comparable to an 80286-16 to 386DX-25 PC or higher.
Windows XP with its cartoon colors to Windows 10
Hmm… regarding Windows XP, it wasn’t all that bad, it should have stopped there. Regarding looking like “an arse” I can’t say that visually or practically the user interface of Windows 10 or 11 are a step forwards. First of all, the contrast sucks (minimalistic light colors on a white background instead of good contrast cartoon colors, I like cartoons and I payed for all to 24-bit colors so I would like to see them as much as possible), sliderbars are one pixel wide, menu’s look not like menu’s anymore, a simple configuration becomes a search through a system that fills your screen but doesn’t do anything really then showing off it’s new “modern look” and wasting screen space. The fact that I can’t really access the printerport or serial port like I to do in the XP days is not relevant to many users, but still it’s a step back for hackers/makers. I like the Amiga user interface, where pulldown menus are actually pulled down, which is great concept. I like Windows XP, it just worked and maybe I like it even more than the newer versions since it reminds me more of my Amiga than the modern Windows of today. Those look more like a crippled tablet or blown up phone interface. MS screwed up since Windows 8 and they are recovering ever since. The fact that it took 20 years to get from XP to 10 isn’t really something to brag about.
“Amiga was design by group of dudes with a “vision” where criticism of their ideas meant your fired.” could be, but any company can fire people for less. And criticism isn’t a good thing to bring to work, a company is a company and NOT a democracy.
XP lets you customize everything. You can make it look however you want. Vista and later in theory have some options, but in practice good luck finding them. For daily use I still run XP in a virtualbox on Ubuntu (using my MSDNAA keys from university).
The Amiga had its feet in two streams – gaming and productivity – which sometimes flowed in the same direction and sometimes didn’t.
The original vision for the Amiga hardware was a games machine, and that evolved into something much greater than the sum of its parts. By the time the Amiga actually became commercially successful, the original Amiga Corp team had mostly departed Commodore. I’m sure many of the engineers who continued their work shared the same vision, but there were clearly too many others competing with their own ideas of what the Amiga should be.
Contrast that with Apple, who always seemed to have a singular coherent vision of what Macs should be. They decided to forgo open standards for the most part, and may have struggled in the 90s, relatively, but in the long run it paid off big time for them.
Also, games consoles continued using bespoke, custom hardware until well into the 2010s.
lol
Absolutely clueless.
To all the people doing new mainboards for basically all Amiga models:
Please develop a A600 AGA mainboard! That wwould be totally awesome! Maybe with a pistorm32 integrated :D
The A1200 was out of my parents’ price range when getting me a new computer for Christmas. So I ended up with an A600.
The unit I got was defective and hard crashed a lot. By the time we took it back to the shop after the holiday period, the A1200 had come down in price to what my parents had paid for the A600. I walked out of the shop with a sparkly new A1200!
The difference between the two was night & day and I never worked out why Commodore even made the A600. Then again, it wasn’t a company famous for making good business decisions…
I’ve seen the Amiga 600 running doom tho. Surely it could run a simple dos game. The pc would only dream of making something like space balls. I actually think that the Gameboy and the hand held tech, I swapped a genises at the time for a 500 was the nail in the coffin
Calling the A600 a repackaged A1000 makes one think the writer here knows nothing about the Amiga. The A600 was in the ECS chipset family. It was an A3000 with a 68000.
Interestingly, the A1000 had an ICS chipset initially, then OCS..
There’s so much information. The more you look into the Amiga topic, the more you questions you have. :)
So…
The A600 was designed as a cheaper + slightly updated A500, not a warmed up A1000 in any way or form.
About the price my memory isn’t good enough these days to outright dismiss it, however I strongly suspect it is quite wrong.
Expansion wise the A600 did good with a (more or less) standard PCMCIA card slot and the suggestion that a refurbished A500 (?!?) would be a better choice is strange. Like even refurbished and assuming it was a A500+ model there would be no integrated HDD support while the A600 just needed a standard drive plugged in. Both could use a SCART TV as a monitor if needed BTW, something not possible with standard PCs.
The comment on the A600 not having chunky graphics is true but relevant. It never indended to improve upon the Amiga line other than lowering costs. Development for new chipsets with better support was ongoing however that was completely separate efforts.
I guess all the HDD was good for was speeding up AmigaDOS’s boot and other, “unprotected”, files. When I found out that there wasn’t a way to upload, “back up”, games (on 3.5in) I took a pass.
I loved the A500 and A1200 mainly for the games and software like DPaint and any animation packages. Public domain was great for guys (and gals) to show off their talents as they were being taught computing in school.
I have the three Eye of the Beholder games on GOC and would love find all the other games I use to play. I suppose I was forced to buy a PC when Amiga software couldn’t be bought. I did have a load of discs full of software and original games and the free discs off the Amiga magazines. I use to have the Acorn Electron and a Amstrad C464 two other great gaming machines
Looks like Commodore had about a year until Doom came out (Dec’93). But Castle Wolfenstein (sorry Wolfenstein 3D) was already impressive and better than anything full screen the Amiga could cook up.
In my recollection, by ’92, Amiga had already lost to PC gaming. PC was still more costly, but you could maybe justify that by also having “productivity”, Windows 3.1 (April 1992).
Then Doom just killed everything. The first level demo was available before the game, I think, and I’m unclear who got it and how, but it incapacitated the company I worked for for a week, thanks to an IPX network.
The mistake was not using the 040 for the 1200. And Doom was possible with a 030 (the very first version was made in a NeXT Computer with an 030).
“Then Doom just killed everything.”
Amen. 🙏
“In my recollection, by ’92, Amiga had already lost to PC gaming. PC was still more costly, but you could maybe justify that by also having “productivity”, Windows 3.1 (April 1992).”
Not just productivity stuff, but also hobby software or software that your club had used.
On PC, you had everything, including the very niche stuff (bible quote software).
You had Visual Basic (DOS/Win) and Turbo Pascal / Turbo Pascal for Windows, just to name two things.
There was networking software, astronomy software, raytracing software, 3D design software,
paint programs with hires support, amateur radio software, handy scanners, there was software for the model train,
software for fans of Origami paper planes etc pp.
You also had communications software, for AOL, Genie, CompuServe, Minitel, Prodigy etc.
You had a dozen terminal programs, too.
That’s why so many Amiga users had secretly used PC emulators, after all.
And the Amiga had.. games (pirated), games (public domain), games (demos), games (cracked), games (bought used).
Scene stuff, demos, fractals, tracker music. The freaky stuff.
Commercial Amiga software written by “middle aged men” declined by 1990.
No more biorythm software, astronomy software, software for PC interfaces (construction kits),
no more accounting software, no more wordprocessor software etc.
All the real life stuff you would like your computer to help you with.
No. From here on, the teenagers and Amiga computer freaks took over.
The Amiga basically had two remaining use cases.
a) as an video editing computer in TV studios (A2000 and up, US)
b) a toy computer in the kids’ bed room (A500 and similar, EU).
In greatly simplified terms, of course.
Whereas the PCs had been used for all sorts of kinds.
Yeah, reality hurts. I also feel a bit sad for the Amiga here.
The Amiga OS still had some potential at the time, I think.
Is the author’s name Al or is it A.I., because this was an interesting read.
For instance, this part:
“..but had more features, like an external port…”
Like an external port? Um. It had lots of external ports.
I am thinking maybe the author means an edge connector like the A500 had.
And the A600 didn’t have that. But it did have a PCMCIA slot.
So you could add Ethernet, SCSI, and other things using that.
And it had an internal IDE header and spot for a laptop size IDE drive, so you didn’t need “an external port” for that. But if you wanted to, you could do that with PCMCIA.
The A600 had issues (price being the biggest IMHO, it was too expensive for their “low end” offering), but it was as expandable as the A500, just used a different method.
I had a Amiga 500 first in high school, and upgrade to the C128 that I had before, and then my grandma bought me for college an Amiga 3000, that I had for years. The Amiga 600/1200 was a refresh from a stale 500/2000 – the 1000 was long gone. The interesting aspect of the Amiga 600, which sold reasonably well in Germany, was an (optional) ATA hard drive that was significantly cheaper than the SCSI hard drive from the 2000 and 3000 series. Back then, I found the PCMCIA port interesting.
The problem with the Amigas was that the innovation cycle was too slow, and the more advanced models way too expensive, compared to emerging PC technology. I already thought this when I oogled the A2000UX at CeBIT. That was really what we wanted in a next model, but it was way out of reach for consumers, even those that had sufficient spending will. The A3000 was originally super expensive, but prices were slashed in half fairly quickly, and was a really fine machine. I did my first Mosaic on it via SLIP and ISDN to the university.
My A3000 was eventually replaced with an OS/2 Warp machine, and later with NT. I am technologist, and spending into tech tools always made sense for me. The A4000 was too late.
Back then, I so the A1200 as a true replacement for the A500. In my peripheral environment, and I was then in college, I knew no one with an A600. It was more a kiddy gaming box.
The big problem with the 600 was it came with workbench 3 which has compatible issues with a lot of older Amiga games, you could live with that for the 1200 because you got the fancy AGA games but the 600 didn’t it was basically a 500 without the wide backwards compatibility.
To add to the list of inaccuracies in this article, let’s look at the claim “by 1992 the writing was on the wall that Intel silicon would win”. Intel’s x86 was not the future in 1992. Most of the industry was betting on RISC – Apple and IBM were pushing PowerPC as the future, Sun was continuing to develop SPARC, and even Intel itself was pushing the RISC i860 for high end machines. Apple, Atari and, yes, Commodore were selling 68040 machines well into the 90s, and as others have pointed out, the A600 would have been much more competitive with a newer Motorola processor.
From a gaming perspective the PC was barely a contender in 1992 – partly because it wouldn’t work out of the box for anything even vaguely complex. The user had to know DOS to configure IRQs for sound cards and EMM386 for memory management. I know, because I did that so I could play Frontier: Elite II. It wasn’t fun. Consequently, if you wanted to play games, the market the A600 was clearly aiming at, you still went for an Amiga or Atari ST or possibly a console. The games just ran on them. That only started to be true on the PC with the advent of Windows 95.
Or, if you were of a certain mindset, you could buy an Acorn Archimedes, which used the first ARM processor. And I’d say in 2025 the writing’s on the wall that ARM’s silicon will win.