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.
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 A600 worked out of the box with TV so no need for a monitor. And hard drives in the Amiga world then were still a massive luxury. Also the A600 was more a tiny evolution of the A500 rather than a repackaged A1000. Boy there are so many issues with this short article, is it Artificial Intelligence Williams that wrote this garbage?!
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.
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!!!
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!!!
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 đŸ˜‚ 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?
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.
obvious troll is obvious.
popcorn
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