> By the time you added a monitor and a hard drive to get the system you really wanted, it cost closer to $1,000. At that price, you could get an off-brand PC with a VGA monitor.
So I decided to check some prices in 1992 computer catalogs and I'm not sure this is really true. Looking at the Tandy catalog[0], you could get a Tandy 1000 RLX with a 10 MHz 286, 512k of RAM, VGA and a monitor for $1K, but it didn't come with a hard drive at that price. The same catalog also lists a Tandy 1000 RL with a 9.5 MHz 8086, 512k of RAM and CGA/Tandy graphics for $500 without monitor. I think the 600 actually fairs pretty well against that machine.
Looking at a Sears catalog from 1992, they have a Packard Bell 386SX with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB HD for $1100, but without a monitor. The cheapest monitor option on that page was another $290.
Obviously two random catalogs doesn't give you comprehensive pricing data, but at least from this quick look it does seem like the 600 was reasonably competitive at the $500 price point it was sold at.
Seems to me the bigger problems were higher up the product line. Not having a real response to the rise of VGA (first introduced 1987) until October 1992 was a huge miss.
In Portugal it certainly wasn't, and I am quite sure, given I got a 386SX at 20 MHz (with Turbo!), 40MB, SVGA monitor in that year, as upgrade to a Timex 2068 which I had been holding to since 1986.
It was about 15000 euros (300723 escudos) in 1992's money, which given our economy meant a credit spread over three years.
Meanwhile, Amigas were at a quarter of that value, and most folks used the TV anyway, I think I only saw Amigas plugged into monitors at the computer stores.
From at I remember, at least in Europe, it's only from 1994-1995 that you could start thinking having a better proposition with a PC than with an Amiga/Atari ST.
In order to surpass what you had on an Amiga 500/600 in terms of games, your needed at least a small 386 VGA.
Before that, the only way to get a configuration at the same price was typically some Amstrad PC (typically the popular PC1512), far less capable in terms of graphics and music.
As an owner of an Amiga 500, I remember watching the 600 flop even though I was mildly interested in upgrading, but he's right that this was the point where a lot of users like me threw in the towel and said "Right, I'm just getting a PC." And I did, and it was probably the best decision I could have made at that time.
For arcade-style platform games and shmups, the A600 was competitively priced compared to PC:s, at least for a year or so. The biggest problem with the Amiga line in general was that it couldn't feasibly keep up with 486 CPU:s and the game complexity they enabled. Consumer-level Amigas were supposed to be cheap and cheerful - that was their selling point. Adding a 68040 (or even a fast 68030) would've pushed the price point into another territory entirely.
To be honest there's lots of little factual inaccuracies in that piece. The notion that the A600 was "fully software-compatible with the A500" just isn't true.
Similarly, claiming that the SoundBlaster had "22 voice sound" vs the Amiga's 4 voices. Yes, later SBs had a 22 channel FM synth chip, but that's not remotely the same thing!
It would have been more accurate to say that as PCs became faster they became capable of mixing multiple audio samples together before playing them through a stereo (ie. "2 voice") DSP - using the greater CPU power to match (and, eventually, exceed) the Amiga's sound capabilities.
In general, I suspect the author is misunderstanding secondary sources, rather than misremembering first-hand experience.
The Amiga's audio reproduction is an odd beast. Incredibly sophisticated one hand then completely hamstrung by the fact that stereo planning has to be done in software. So you either run it as 4 independent mono channels, or you devote lots of CPU time to software panning, which rules doing that if anything else CPU intensive is going on. So you basically can't have stereophonic audio in games.
Yes, also the lack of peripherals. Amiga had way better graphics and sound in 1985 to 1987 than almost all PCs with no extra peripherals. But with PC compatibles becoming more established also the the range of graphics cards and sound cards grew.
I agree. The A600 was a costcut and future proofing of A500 with some extra features.
The disappointment was A1200 and A4000. The A1200 was not enough for gaming, A4000 was not enough for workstation use. Both could have been so much better with pretty minor changes.
I remember how we were fuming at the A4000 opting for IDE over SCSI, and the other ways it was hampered, and how ugly it was. The A4000's was PC-ification of the Amiga without the upsides - things like SCSI helped offset the anaemic higher end M68k CPU's. An A3000 + faster CPU + flicker fixer built in + AGA, would've been vastly superior. Basically Dave Haynie's A3000+ prototype.
I recall reading commodore had a glut of PC cases and tooling they wanted to use up, hence the weird case for the A4000 with the mouse ports cut out inconveniently on the side.
And MMU... and CPU daughter cards on the Zorro bus with local RAM for things like "distributed" Lightwave rendering. It would have made performance better for the rather price insensitive pro segment.
Commodore basically catered to no market segment.
Edit: the A1200 could have been better (twice the speed for calculations) if it had some just a tiny sliver of fast RAM instead of only chip RAM. And so on. It should also have had a VGA connector, it wouldn't have cost more than a few cents. People used TVs because the couldn't find multisync monitors. Commodore, a fractal of bad business decisions.
The A1200 lacking fastmem out of the box does seem like a strange decision, but in this case I believe Commodore actually listened to game developers. Having more chipmem instead meant that games could effortlessly load more graphics, music and sampled audio.
As for the VGA connector, there was a cheap Amiga RGB->VGA adapter available. Connectivity wasn't the problem. The issue was that VGA monitors couldn't cope with a 15 kHz PAL/NTSC signal. Many didn't work with the 50 Hz PAL refresh, either. In order for a VGA connector to be meaningful, hardware would've been needed to address this, adding to the cost of the machine - and ruining the 50 Hz sync of a massive, pre-existing games library.
If it had even 32 kilobytes of fast mem, (it had 2 megs of chip, same as the original Playstation) it would have made a huge difference for games.
Back in the day, people didn't even know Amiga 1200 could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of. If it had a VGA connector people would know they could run productivity software on a regular monitor. Having a TV for gaming and a monitor for word processing would have been fine. There's precedent with Atari supporting both regular (TV-like frequencies) monitors and the monochrome monitor for productivity.
(IIRC you had to press both mouse buttons at boot or something like that to get VGA frequencies. All of this could have been made automatic if the VGA monitor was plugged in or something. BOM cost would have been almost 0. No strategic thinking at all at Commodore leadership, no understanding of the market.)
Back in the day, people didn't even know Amiga 1200 could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of.
The Commodore monitors which were released at the time intended for use with A1200/A4000, the 1940 and 1942, had a permanently attached 15-pin VGA cable. I know because I have one for my A1200.
These monitors were dual-sync 15 and 31 KHz devices, and were perfectly usable as a VGA monitor with a PC. Probably not a lot of PC users bought them.
But if you bought the 1940 for use with the Amiga 1200, you couldn't plug it into the computer without a 15->23 pin adapter. I'm sure it came with the adapter in the box, but still...
32 k of fastmem probably wouldn't have made much difference at all. A single routine or two could maybe run faster, but data for them would still have to be mostly in chipmem. Plus, you'd need to add space and tracing for it on the motherboard. Once you've done that, 32 k seems a bit pointless. Then you might as well have added a SIMM socket, too. The initial doubled speed and increased video bandwith compared to the A500 was already a major step up for the type of Amiga games that were popular when the A1200 was designed.
Whether or not people knew of the scandoubled modes back in the day, well, me and all my friends certainly did, and all the A1200 reviews I've read mentions them. Having both a TV and a VGA monitor sort of defeats the purpose of a cheap, compact entry-level machine. Atari users typically had _either_, not _both_: The monochrome monitor was for the DTP and music studio markets.
There was no mode switching in the early startup menu, apart from being able to toggle between NTSC and PAL. Selection of AGA scandoubled modes were made in the Workbench preferences. Adding some kind of auto-sensing hardware would add to the cost of the machine and require a rewrite of Workbench to cope with this in some way without interfering with screenmode preferences (and what if you indeed had both a TV and a VGA monitor hooked up at the same time?).
In hindsight, I think the A1200 was a decent solution to a hard problem: constructing a cheap, worthwhile upgrade while remaining compatible with as much existing software and hardware as possible.
Have you read Brian Bagnall's series of books on Commodore? It really digs into the full universe of badness that was Commodore management in excruciating detail.
In the US, in the 90's, there were many, many other cottage-shop PC builders, setting up shop.
So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it, like .. on the regular, much cheaper.
Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in those days.
(Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)
I think the article is a little hard on the 600 in its stock configuration. (That's not to say that Commodore did a great job with it, in terms of product-line placement. Oh, Commodore... >sigh<)
The 600 isn't a "repackaged Amiga 1000" or a "cut-down version of the Amiga 500". It didn't make sense in the line-up when Commodore introduced it, but it's definitely a step-up from the A1000 and A500. Having the Enhanced Chip Set[0] meant getting the Productivity video modes on a multisync monitor.
The internal ATA controller was also a big enhancement as compared to the A500 and A1000, too. Laptop IDE/ATA drives were getting pretty common. When equipped with a hard disk it was vastly more portable than an A500 (w/ a "sidecar" hard disk drive module).
Having the built-in color composite video output was a "win" for just plugging it into a TV or VCR. Again, that helped with portability as compared to an A500.
As a retro machine it is a cute little machine. The community has definitely stepped-up with enhancements for the A600, though.
Agree, definitely not a repackaged 1000 / 500. It also shipped with Kickstart 2.0 / Workbench 2.0 which was a pretty decent upgrade on 1.3 that the A500 had. And it shipped with 1MB of chip RAM, rather than 512KB. 1MB chip wasn't possible in the A500 without soldering IIRC. Some games utilised that, though bot many.
I think once the 1200 came out it was just an odd product in the lineup. The 1200 made way more sense given the massive upgrade across CPU, memory, chipset and OS
It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0
The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard)
Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that.
The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting.
Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.
I'd disagree. Chipset and architecture wise, there is not much that makes the A600 different from an A500. ECS is almost zero improvement over OCS for most use cases. Both are on the same old ~7mhz 68000 CPU, which was absolutely ancient by 1992 when the A600 was released. The A500 was a cost reduced A1000, and there is little real difference to the user (other than kickstart in ROM.)
If anything, the A600 is a downgrade because it's missing the Zorro expansion bus...
Yes though it was pretty easy to update the 500 to KS2.0. Just replace one chip that was already socketed. I think you could even reuse the original with an eprom burner.
Exactly. Commodore made a mistake when they introduced it but I loved mine to bits! After owning it for about a year I upgraded it with a 68030 turbo (incl. 4 megs of fast mem, an FPU and an MMU) and a 4 gig IBM Travelstar HD. The upgrade made it one of the flakiest bits of computing hardware I've ever used (you'd be lucky to use it for an hour without it crashing) but it was just so frigging cool! I painted it pink and purple and labelled it "Sikakone" ("Pig machine" in Finnish).
Unfortunately not. It was quite the setup! The A600 had a built-in dock for a hard drive but the turbo took its place. I ran a long ATA cable through the PCMCIA slot and had the drive just sit on the table next to the computer. The turbo also ran extremely hot (it had a plastic cover that started to melt almost immediately so I took it off) which meant I couldn't keep the case closed. I propped it open by shoving a 3,5 inch floppy between the disk drive and the case and have it sit there completely vertically. This allowed for enough air flow to keep the thing from overheating too much. Good times!
Sure but none of those improvements had any sort of “wow” factor for the target audience - who were primarily interested in graphics, sound and CPU speed - particularly wrt to gaming. ECS is a marginal improvement, otherwise you’re still looking at 7 year old technology. What killed the Amiga as a mass market device in Europe IMHO were the new consoles - Megadrive and the like which blew it out of the water in terms of eye candy and speed.
But MegaDrive games don't look inherently better than OCS Amiga ones - and sound worse to boot. Compare Desert Strike or Battle Squadron which had a version for both systems. Maybe SNES was an improvement; the main advantage was the price of the system instead (and the hidden cost was that the games were 2x - 3x as expensive, which added up quickly).
If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more details.
It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.
It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.
Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.
Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.
Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.
There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.
Vampire is real hardware alright, but is basically just emulation in that layer instead. The hardware has nothing to do with an Amiga. So I don’t see much being won over traditional emulation in this case, other than perhaps improved input latency and performance.
If I were to go there, I’d go MiSTer or a clone instead, and save a load of cash in the process. You’ll get an A1200 level + AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the content from the Amiga scene.
And for anyone who doesn't mind going down a massive rabbithole there are many variants of Minimig, the original FPGA-based recreation of the Amiga - most of which are on more affordable hardware than the Vampire - and open-source to boot.
The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest nearly-an-Amiga...
The Vampire is way overpriced and the extensions it adds are useless because they only work on other Vamprire machines. The PiStorm is much, much cheaper, and emulates a standard 68k while continuing to use the Amiga chipset.
As someone that was the only PC guy among a group of friends all Amiga owners, I don't think these systems do justice to the original systems.
What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features present on AmigaOS.
The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others, off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply saying they weren't going to work on it then.
When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.
After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.
The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in which classic hardware they care about - most users who stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.
At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.
I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.
I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.
But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.
I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.
Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.
Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
I mean, sure, but, as the Vampire makes clear in its name... it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin as a hat. You can also stick a Raspberry Pi running E-UAE inside an Amiga case for pretty much the same thing (a thing that's definitely not an Amiga, emulating being an Amiga, in the shell of an Amiga)
older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm.
I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code.
Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of WinUAE on their own comp.
> ...I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. ... What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was.
Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind of usage.
AIUI the main limitation with early PC graphics was (1) it was a dumb framebuffer and (2) bandwidth from the system to said framebuffer was too low to replace the entire screen in a single frame. This only really got solved comprehensively in the late 1990s or so, hence prior to that timeframe you were always more or less relying on some kind of "trick" to achieve smooth video output.
Nice article, the A600 was indeed a strange machine to be released between the A500+ and A1200, and the PCMCIA port was a curious choice at the time.
Some thoughts:
* Commodore could have added a faster 68000, and it seems like a good idea in theory. But in order for a faster CPU to have any meaningful impact, they would have needed to add either a sizeable cache or, preferably, some real fastmem (memory that isn't shared with the custom graphics and audio hardware). This would have raised the cost significantly.
* The text doesn't mention the Amiga 500 Plus, also released in 1992, just before the A600. It was an upgraded A500 featuring Kickstart 2.0, the ECS chipset and 1 meg of chipmem. People who had bought an A500+ felt fooled by Commodore, and rightly so: Adding a hard drive to the A600 meant the cost of a stand-alone 2.5" IDE drive. Adding one to an A500/+ involved a sidecar expansion that cost about as much as the computer itself.
* The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
* It wasn't really fully software-compatible with the A500. In part because of the newer Kickstart, in part because of the lack of the A500's peculiar "slowfast" memory that many games took for granted, and in part because of the newer ECS chipset. The same problems afflicted the A500+, and meant that large amounts of already existing games just didn't work. This was the fault of the software houses, sure, but gamers looking for a good deal didn't care; they'd rather buy a second-hand A500 than gamble with an incompatible machine that offered no significant hardware upgrade.
* People in the know who were on the market for an Amiga in 1993 or 1994 probably bought an A1200.
> * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed to compete with themselves.
I honestly can't tell if it was stupid or genius of them, on a corporate level, to sell cheap PC:s that directly competed with Amigas in the home segment. On the one hand, they helped usher in the demise of their own cash cow. On the other hand, there was no shortage of competition from other home PC manufacturers.
Having different products for different market segments is often a good idea. But in many cases Commodore released simultaneous products to compete for the same market segment.
I might be biased as the A600 was the first computer I bought with my own money, but there was no way I would have bought a 386SX over the A600.
This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games were there and the games were great to play, the first game I bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer, soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 - 100 games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I then bought a A1200 but it was not the same...
Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed there would be a release at some point.
Three words, plug and play!
I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an inch out )) lol
It showcased the A600 and the style of the machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so.
The A500, A600 and A1200 are all prone to discoloration....
I still have two A600's and one A1200 and all of them are still working, not bad for a computer that is 33 years old and took a battering for many years.
Nah, I was an Amiga 500 user in Europe at the time and was looking at maybe getting an Amiga 2000 or 3000, but with VGA games like Comanche and Ultima VII being released on PC, great IDEs like Turbo Pascal/C/C++ available, the value proposition of the Amiga just wasn't really there anymore, the writing was on the wall. And so with a heavy heart I bought a 486DX instead. I agree insofar as I wouldn't have opted for a 386SX.
> This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
The author is from the US and is relating his experience that what he saw around him at the time. Every article I read about the Amiga from someone in the UK or EU is also "tilted" based on their experiences. There was no global experience when it came to the Amiga, other than it started in the US first and died in the UK/EU. By the time the 1200 made a big splash overseas, the US was well down another path - the road that ultimately became everyone's. So there's a time-shift at play and a regional one. How that played into the PC/Mac market in their respective regions is really up to economics at the time.
>I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
Agree about wishing AGA was way too little, way too late. I wish they'd released it no later than 1990 rather than the end of 1992. Maybe then Commodore could have kept the massive US market's interest longer than they did. The choices Commodore made, well... it's no wonder what happened, happened.
Doom was indeed the death knell of the Amiga - most Amiga games were still targeting ECS due to market share and were pretty much rehashes of old titles.
Doom came along and was the first PC game that was standout with "must have" wow factor. I remember spending hours late one night getting 3 person multi player working via some ghetto IPX over serial hack.
I remember spending my whole years (part-time) work salary on an Amiga 4000 in 1993 or 94. I miss that computer. But man, my then girlfriend (now wife) was pretty horrified that I spent so much money on a computer… I don’t remember what other plans she had for my money, haha.
The big issue was less technical and more market based. I remember in 92 you could easily get an Amiga 500 for under $500 that this sold for. People were upgrading and stores were doing clearances of old stock. So it competed with a flood of Amiga 500s.
The article doesn't mention the recent development in Amiga extension cards - PiStorm is an easy (and affordable) way to max out the specs of any Amiga, A600 included.
I think MNT / mntre also have some Amiga expansion cards for graphics and sound. For me I'll keep my memories for fear of being disappointed. Maybe if the mini had included shadow of the beast, lemmings, bubble bobble, great ghiana sisters, I might have been more tempted. But then I would have wanted devpac and a true 680n0 chip + the fun chiplets to play with.
I never heard of a graphics card for the Amiga until a decade later. In 92 I bought a IBM clone that cost 1/2 the price of an Amiga. One of my roommates had an Amiga 1000, and he got another 600 when it came out. In 96, I got one in trade for a Macintosh, while the roommate and I both got Lucas Acellerators and IDE interfaces for pennies on the dollar. We played games that used the serial ports. We had 1mb of chip ram and 2 mb of fast ram, the price of which was falling fast.
I think the lucas boards were 25mhz MC68030,and within a few weeks,we had gotten 33mhz parts w/ FPUs and soldered on new crystals. Such an incredible source of cheap fun, while the I world was struggling with widows 1,2,3. The Amiga was, as was claimed, head and hands above the PC until the 486s became cheap 8~10 years later. Amigas ruled. Too bad commodore were such schmucks.
I've had a stock A600 for over a decade, it was okay. Sure I had to run a ReloKick for some games but the OS was vastly superior to the awful blue-orange flat shading ugly 1.3 topaz font hell of A500. Sure A500+ existed but over here (central europe) it was very rare and it was missing the IDE port anyway.
Ironically for me the greatest issue was lack of the numpad, which caused issues with some software, and forced a very lasting aversion to numpad usage on me.
From today's perspective, A600 is... annoying, which I've found out a few years ago. The architecture choices are hard to work with: the PCMCIA slot limits the amount of memory you can work with (well, unless you don't want to use it but it's almost indispensable, esp. for data transfer), the internal bus only accepts "slow" RAM - the desired Fast RAM (CPU exclusive) can only be added by expansions put directly over the CPU itself. Sure, there are Vampires and PiStorms but the compatibility of both can be a bit spotty, and if you're dumping that much on the system you must love it specifically, lest you'd just go with an A1200 which is superior in every respect.
On that note, currently the easiest no-brainer Amiga to actually have fun with without eating your budget too much is an A1200. Slap an 8MB fast ram expansion, an IDE CF controller, and 3.2.2 OS/ROM it's ready to go. WHDLoad installs exist for every important game and many obscure ones too, data transfer can go either via PCMCIA>CF card, or a Parallel Port contraption that reads microSD cards. And if you want more power (though I can't imagine why, unless you want to run Doom on it), TerribleFire cards aren't too pricey. 128MB RAM + 030/060 CPU is a substantial boost (note: games, especially early 3D, will break with that much power).
Just watch for leaky capacitors (thankfully there's a whole industry for fixing this), and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore).
It isn't true though. C64 PSUs would fail high and fry downstream chips and passives. Amiga PSUs are designed to fail low, and with the exception of some exceptionally rare faults, they won't fry your computer if the capacitors fail
It fried mine, twice in a row. Lost the A600, which came with A1200 PSU, and then an A500 to a different PSU. Additionally, the second(ary) issue with A1200 PSU is it's barely strong enough to support the base hardware configuration and will make expanded systems unstable.
Those complaints ring true. I had one and you ran into its limitations almost immediately, but that would not likely be an issue were it not for the fact that not everything was compatible between a500, a1200 and a600. But even that wasn't the biggest issue. The most amusing issue, in retrospect -- I hated this as a kid, was lack of full keyboard, because, please try not to laugh, I could not play civilization properly since it had no numpad. It was years later before I could enjoy moving diagonally. Eh, to be a child again.
The A500 and A600 are near identical. The tiny differences between them are in fact not incompatibilities in that sense. The A1200 is quite a different upgrade, and software making use of its new custom hardware features (or 68020-specific instructions) will obviously not run on the A600/500+/500, though the A1200 will run any correctly written piece of software from the past.
I've always seen A600 more like a budget version of A1200 rather than a new variant of A500: better graphics chip, IDE port, PCMCIA and new look-and-feel of the Workbench 2.04 (at the first sight hardly distinguishable from the Workbench 3.0) gave a taste of something new.
I feel that "budget A1200" is a misnomer. The IDE port was its strongest addition, but internally it's still just an A500 with ECS instead of OCS, and that never really panned out as leverage. Not even the additional 512KB of chipmem made a splash. No more than a handful of titles, productivity and games alike, took any advantage of it. Incomparable to the upgrade seen with AGA and a 14 MHz 020.
Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDDs which were a fraction of the cost of SCSI HDDs with some expensive third party adapter.
But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big leap was from 1.3 to 2.0
(of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if you wanted)
Indeed, it is a shame that the A600 didn't come with Kickstart/Workbench 3.x.
It had other improvements than just support for the AGA chipset's video modes.
"Datatypes" were pretty neat. Thanks to it, the Amiga got PNG support in all web browsers before many other platforms got it at all.
If I remember correctly most of the 600s compatibility issues could be worked around by adjusting settings via _early startup control system_.
Eg by switching off newer hardware features.
Yeah, prices have shot way up over the last 2-3 years, and not just for the big-box Amigas, even A1200 prices have got fairly silly. But people have a whole lot of love for the Amiga, it was a revolutionary machine at the time, and for many people it was their introduction to doing creative things with computers, as well as the gaming.
And retro gaming/computing is a growing hobby. There's so much new hardware and software out there for old platforms now, letting you add never-before-possible upgrades (e.g. PiStorm for the Amiga), get decent output to a modern TV, and sometimes give them shiny new cases and keyboards. Which is great if you already had a collection of retro machines, but not so much if you're trying to buy them now, with increased demand and ever diminishing supply.
Meh.
Whole Amiga concept was a glorified game console for PAL/NTSC TV standard.
Once PC market moved aboive using TV monitors, whole Amiga lineup was doomed.
As anything Commodore ever did, Amiga was far overengineered for what it did.
That being said, there are only two Amigas worth remembering:
- A500 as original one ( A1000 was overpriced crap)
- A1200 as a cheap successor. Its upgrade value was "meh", but it was cheap. And there were games, actually using those extras. And it had a cheap HDD option (used an IDE drive).
The Amiga brought us DPaint, OctaMED, AMOS, Blitz Basic, and a whole lot more.
People bought it for the games, then got interested in the creative possibilities. At the very least it inspired a generation of game developers, digital artists, and electronic music creators.
Meanwhile, many PCs of the time only had PC speaker audio capabilities, the horrible palette of EGA, and the inability to scroll the screen smoothly. And a DOS prompt rather than a smoothly-multitasking GUI.
Yes, there were only a few short years before the PC caught up/overtook the Amiga. But for those few years, the Amiga was something really special.
It was cheaper than a PC and much nicer to use - Windows was terrible in that era, the janky mouse jumping all over the place under load due to no hardware sprite and serial buffer overrun.
Meanwhile an Amiga under 100% CPU would have a silky smooth mouse due to hardware mouse port tracking and sprite pointer.
Then you had stuff like autoconfig hardware that was 10 years ahead of its time.
Except the system was designed with a productivity display oriented RGB port that worked, and its main selling point was the hardware, not the games. My stock 1200 can output 1440x550 res and more, and it works just fine.
Deluxe Paint, tracker music, Video Toaster w/Lightwave, all Amiga achievements. And all systems were extremely good value for the dollar until late VGA era. Europe understood and appreciated that; US unfortunately had Commodore main branch, which was very self-sabotaging, to put it mlildly.
I remember going through a TON of pirated SW to get useful PCB CAD programs on Amiga (being the graphic "beast" of the time) and wasted a ton on non-PC harware (basically everything from Sinclair QL to Atari ST lines and Amigas, from 500 to 1200) only to admit defeat years later and settle on plain old DOS PC and Tango.
Amiga was ATROCIOUS for everything besides gaming.
Its graphics was great only on paper - until you had it on the desk and havign to use it daily.
> By the time you added a monitor and a hard drive to get the system you really wanted, it cost closer to $1,000. At that price, you could get an off-brand PC with a VGA monitor.
So I decided to check some prices in 1992 computer catalogs and I'm not sure this is really true. Looking at the Tandy catalog[0], you could get a Tandy 1000 RLX with a 10 MHz 286, 512k of RAM, VGA and a monitor for $1K, but it didn't come with a hard drive at that price. The same catalog also lists a Tandy 1000 RL with a 9.5 MHz 8086, 512k of RAM and CGA/Tandy graphics for $500 without monitor. I think the 600 actually fairs pretty well against that machine.
Looking at a Sears catalog from 1992, they have a Packard Bell 386SX with 1MB of RAM and a 40MB HD for $1100, but without a monitor. The cheapest monitor option on that page was another $290.
Obviously two random catalogs doesn't give you comprehensive pricing data, but at least from this quick look it does seem like the 600 was reasonably competitive at the $500 price point it was sold at.
Seems to me the bigger problems were higher up the product line. Not having a real response to the rise of VGA (first introduced 1987) until October 1992 was a huge miss.
[0] https://www.radioshackcatalogs.com/flipbook/c1992_rsc-23.htm...
[1] https://christmas.musetechnical.com/ShowCatalogPage/1992-Sea...
In Portugal it certainly wasn't, and I am quite sure, given I got a 386SX at 20 MHz (with Turbo!), 40MB, SVGA monitor in that year, as upgrade to a Timex 2068 which I had been holding to since 1986.
It was about 15000 euros (300723 escudos) in 1992's money, which given our economy meant a credit spread over three years.
Meanwhile, Amigas were at a quarter of that value, and most folks used the TV anyway, I think I only saw Amigas plugged into monitors at the computer stores.
From at I remember, at least in Europe, it's only from 1994-1995 that you could start thinking having a better proposition with a PC than with an Amiga/Atari ST. In order to surpass what you had on an Amiga 500/600 in terms of games, your needed at least a small 386 VGA.
Before that, the only way to get a configuration at the same price was typically some Amstrad PC (typically the popular PC1512), far less capable in terms of graphics and music.
As an owner of an Amiga 500, I remember watching the 600 flop even though I was mildly interested in upgrading, but he's right that this was the point where a lot of users like me threw in the towel and said "Right, I'm just getting a PC." And I did, and it was probably the best decision I could have made at that time.
For arcade-style platform games and shmups, the A600 was competitively priced compared to PC:s, at least for a year or so. The biggest problem with the Amiga line in general was that it couldn't feasibly keep up with 486 CPU:s and the game complexity they enabled. Consumer-level Amigas were supposed to be cheap and cheerful - that was their selling point. Adding a 68040 (or even a fast 68030) would've pushed the price point into another territory entirely.
To be honest there's lots of little factual inaccuracies in that piece. The notion that the A600 was "fully software-compatible with the A500" just isn't true.
Similarly, claiming that the SoundBlaster had "22 voice sound" vs the Amiga's 4 voices. Yes, later SBs had a 22 channel FM synth chip, but that's not remotely the same thing!
It would have been more accurate to say that as PCs became faster they became capable of mixing multiple audio samples together before playing them through a stereo (ie. "2 voice") DSP - using the greater CPU power to match (and, eventually, exceed) the Amiga's sound capabilities.
In general, I suspect the author is misunderstanding secondary sources, rather than misremembering first-hand experience.
The Amiga's audio reproduction is an odd beast. Incredibly sophisticated one hand then completely hamstrung by the fact that stereo planning has to be done in software. So you either run it as 4 independent mono channels, or you devote lots of CPU time to software panning, which rules doing that if anything else CPU intensive is going on. So you basically can't have stereophonic audio in games.
Yes, also the lack of peripherals. Amiga had way better graphics and sound in 1985 to 1987 than almost all PCs with no extra peripherals. But with PC compatibles becoming more established also the the range of graphics cards and sound cards grew.
I agree. The A600 was a costcut and future proofing of A500 with some extra features.
The disappointment was A1200 and A4000. The A1200 was not enough for gaming, A4000 was not enough for workstation use. Both could have been so much better with pretty minor changes.
I remember how we were fuming at the A4000 opting for IDE over SCSI, and the other ways it was hampered, and how ugly it was. The A4000's was PC-ification of the Amiga without the upsides - things like SCSI helped offset the anaemic higher end M68k CPU's. An A3000 + faster CPU + flicker fixer built in + AGA, would've been vastly superior. Basically Dave Haynie's A3000+ prototype.
I recall reading commodore had a glut of PC cases and tooling they wanted to use up, hence the weird case for the A4000 with the mouse ports cut out inconveniently on the side.
And MMU... and CPU daughter cards on the Zorro bus with local RAM for things like "distributed" Lightwave rendering. It would have made performance better for the rather price insensitive pro segment.
Commodore basically catered to no market segment.
Edit: the A1200 could have been better (twice the speed for calculations) if it had some just a tiny sliver of fast RAM instead of only chip RAM. And so on. It should also have had a VGA connector, it wouldn't have cost more than a few cents. People used TVs because the couldn't find multisync monitors. Commodore, a fractal of bad business decisions.
The A1200 lacking fastmem out of the box does seem like a strange decision, but in this case I believe Commodore actually listened to game developers. Having more chipmem instead meant that games could effortlessly load more graphics, music and sampled audio.
As for the VGA connector, there was a cheap Amiga RGB->VGA adapter available. Connectivity wasn't the problem. The issue was that VGA monitors couldn't cope with a 15 kHz PAL/NTSC signal. Many didn't work with the 50 Hz PAL refresh, either. In order for a VGA connector to be meaningful, hardware would've been needed to address this, adding to the cost of the machine - and ruining the 50 Hz sync of a massive, pre-existing games library.
If it had even 32 kilobytes of fast mem, (it had 2 megs of chip, same as the original Playstation) it would have made a huge difference for games.
Back in the day, people didn't even know Amiga 1200 could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of. If it had a VGA connector people would know they could run productivity software on a regular monitor. Having a TV for gaming and a monitor for word processing would have been fine. There's precedent with Atari supporting both regular (TV-like frequencies) monitors and the monochrome monitor for productivity.
(IIRC you had to press both mouse buttons at boot or something like that to get VGA frequencies. All of this could have been made automatic if the VGA monitor was plugged in or something. BOM cost would have been almost 0. No strategic thinking at all at Commodore leadership, no understanding of the market.)
Back in the day, people didn't even know Amiga 1200 could output VGA resolutions. Also, you needed a special adaptor cable which I only saw home-made versions of.
The Commodore monitors which were released at the time intended for use with A1200/A4000, the 1940 and 1942, had a permanently attached 15-pin VGA cable. I know because I have one for my A1200.
These monitors were dual-sync 15 and 31 KHz devices, and were perfectly usable as a VGA monitor with a PC. Probably not a lot of PC users bought them.
But if you bought the 1940 for use with the Amiga 1200, you couldn't plug it into the computer without a 15->23 pin adapter. I'm sure it came with the adapter in the box, but still...
32 k of fastmem probably wouldn't have made much difference at all. A single routine or two could maybe run faster, but data for them would still have to be mostly in chipmem. Plus, you'd need to add space and tracing for it on the motherboard. Once you've done that, 32 k seems a bit pointless. Then you might as well have added a SIMM socket, too. The initial doubled speed and increased video bandwith compared to the A500 was already a major step up for the type of Amiga games that were popular when the A1200 was designed.
Whether or not people knew of the scandoubled modes back in the day, well, me and all my friends certainly did, and all the A1200 reviews I've read mentions them. Having both a TV and a VGA monitor sort of defeats the purpose of a cheap, compact entry-level machine. Atari users typically had _either_, not _both_: The monochrome monitor was for the DTP and music studio markets.
There was no mode switching in the early startup menu, apart from being able to toggle between NTSC and PAL. Selection of AGA scandoubled modes were made in the Workbench preferences. Adding some kind of auto-sensing hardware would add to the cost of the machine and require a rewrite of Workbench to cope with this in some way without interfering with screenmode preferences (and what if you indeed had both a TV and a VGA monitor hooked up at the same time?).
In hindsight, I think the A1200 was a decent solution to a hard problem: constructing a cheap, worthwhile upgrade while remaining compatible with as much existing software and hardware as possible.
Have you read Brian Bagnall's series of books on Commodore? It really digs into the full universe of badness that was Commodore management in excruciating detail.
No, thanks, I'll get ahold of them.
In the US, in the 90's, there were many, many other cottage-shop PC builders, setting up shop.
So yeah - your catalog Tandy has a 'competitive' price, but you could - in those days - take such a catalog into "Joe's Computers" and get a cottage-shop PC, or at least parts for it, like .. on the regular, much cheaper.
Pasadena Computer Trade Show was how I built my mega-PC's in those days.
(Amiga dominated in Hollywood, though, for a while .. I had pals who scoffed at my mega-PC's with their fully tricked-out Video Toaster rigs, and their Dec Alpha render-farms were often pitched against my SGI boxes, over lunch-time jests...)
I think the article is a little hard on the 600 in its stock configuration. (That's not to say that Commodore did a great job with it, in terms of product-line placement. Oh, Commodore... >sigh<)
The 600 isn't a "repackaged Amiga 1000" or a "cut-down version of the Amiga 500". It didn't make sense in the line-up when Commodore introduced it, but it's definitely a step-up from the A1000 and A500. Having the Enhanced Chip Set[0] meant getting the Productivity video modes on a multisync monitor.
The internal ATA controller was also a big enhancement as compared to the A500 and A1000, too. Laptop IDE/ATA drives were getting pretty common. When equipped with a hard disk it was vastly more portable than an A500 (w/ a "sidecar" hard disk drive module).
Having the built-in color composite video output was a "win" for just plugging it into a TV or VCR. Again, that helped with portability as compared to an A500.
As a retro machine it is a cute little machine. The community has definitely stepped-up with enhancements for the A600, though.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Enhanced_Chip_Set
Agree, definitely not a repackaged 1000 / 500. It also shipped with Kickstart 2.0 / Workbench 2.0 which was a pretty decent upgrade on 1.3 that the A500 had. And it shipped with 1MB of chip RAM, rather than 512KB. 1MB chip wasn't possible in the A500 without soldering IIRC. Some games utilised that, though bot many.
I think once the 1200 came out it was just an odd product in the lineup. The 1200 made way more sense given the massive upgrade across CPU, memory, chipset and OS
It's not a repackaged A500 but it IS a repackaged (and enhanced with the IDE/PCMCIA interface) A500+ which was also already shipping with ECS, 1Mb Chip RAM and Kickstart 2.0 The stupid thing was it was designed to be cheaper to produce and sell than the outgoing A500+ and was supposed to be branded the A300 (early revisions even have A300 printed in the top copper layer on the motherboard) Long term it was cheaper to produce and had fewer warranty returns however at launch the production cost was higher than expected so they had to sell it for MORE than the outgoing A500+ (for what was perceived at the time as no real improvement to the end user and a lack of numberpad meant breaking functionality for programs and games that relied on the numpad) and changed the name up to A600 to reflect that. The biggest problem IMHO is that the 600 was launched before the A1200 was announced so the whole product just seemed like a slap in the face for what we were expecting. Basically at the time it just felt like a massive let down so out anger was directed as hatred of the product, but in hindsight it's easier to see the tangible benefits.
The 500 Plus had ECS and supported up to 2MB chip RAM without soldering (and shipped with Kickstart 2.04)
Ah true, good point. Forgot about the 500 Plus.
I'd disagree. Chipset and architecture wise, there is not much that makes the A600 different from an A500. ECS is almost zero improvement over OCS for most use cases. Both are on the same old ~7mhz 68000 CPU, which was absolutely ancient by 1992 when the A600 was released. The A500 was a cost reduced A1000, and there is little real difference to the user (other than kickstart in ROM.)
If anything, the A600 is a downgrade because it's missing the Zorro expansion bus...
Yes though it was pretty easy to update the 500 to KS2.0. Just replace one chip that was already socketed. I think you could even reuse the original with an eprom burner.
I updated my A500 to kickstart 2.0 but I never did the 1mb chip RAM Agnus mod
Neither did I but the fast ram upgrade module was pretty good too.
Exactly. Commodore made a mistake when they introduced it but I loved mine to bits! After owning it for about a year I upgraded it with a 68030 turbo (incl. 4 megs of fast mem, an FPU and an MMU) and a 4 gig IBM Travelstar HD. The upgrade made it one of the flakiest bits of computing hardware I've ever used (you'd be lucky to use it for an hour without it crashing) but it was just so frigging cool! I painted it pink and purple and labelled it "Sikakone" ("Pig machine" in Finnish).
That sounds awesome, do you have any pictures of your Sikakone?
Unfortunately not. It was quite the setup! The A600 had a built-in dock for a hard drive but the turbo took its place. I ran a long ATA cable through the PCMCIA slot and had the drive just sit on the table next to the computer. The turbo also ran extremely hot (it had a plastic cover that started to melt almost immediately so I took it off) which meant I couldn't keep the case closed. I propped it open by shoving a 3,5 inch floppy between the disk drive and the case and have it sit there completely vertically. This allowed for enough air flow to keep the thing from overheating too much. Good times!
Sure but none of those improvements had any sort of “wow” factor for the target audience - who were primarily interested in graphics, sound and CPU speed - particularly wrt to gaming. ECS is a marginal improvement, otherwise you’re still looking at 7 year old technology. What killed the Amiga as a mass market device in Europe IMHO were the new consoles - Megadrive and the like which blew it out of the water in terms of eye candy and speed.
But MegaDrive games don't look inherently better than OCS Amiga ones - and sound worse to boot. Compare Desert Strike or Battle Squadron which had a version for both systems. Maybe SNES was an improvement; the main advantage was the price of the system instead (and the hidden cost was that the games were 2x - 3x as expensive, which added up quickly).
ECS barely added anything for the average user. Almost nobody used the productivity or weird super-hires modes.
They could’ve skipped the A600 entirely and just left the A500 Plus on the market.
If anyone was interested in the Amiga but has not kept up with recent developments, I suggest looking up the Vampire V4. It is mentioned in the article but I thought I'd add a few more details.
It has a reimplementation of the ECS and AGA chipset. It includes custom extensions to the chipset to 'SAGA' which is an attempt at extending the registers to more modern standards.
It also has a reimplementation of the 680x0 CPU, which is using more modern design techniques. The developer used to work on Power.
Anyway putting it all together its a great system in the vein of the Amiga. Of course it is not as fast as a modern ASIC, being consumer low end FPGA based. Still it is great fun.
Relevant to the Amiga 600? Well there is a standalone version but there is also a version called 'Manticore' that fits into the Amiga 600.
Many people will say you can get similar performance with emulation. This is of course true though, as someone who studied microelectronics, I see the value in real hardware. Both in future potential for making an ASIC and for more precise sub-microsecond level timing.
There is an alternative semi-emulation approach. i.e. emulating the CPU with a raspberry pi and using the rest of the original hardware. This is known as PiStorm and connects the GPIOs from PI onto the 68K to replace the original CPU.
Vampire is real hardware alright, but is basically just emulation in that layer instead. The hardware has nothing to do with an Amiga. So I don’t see much being won over traditional emulation in this case, other than perhaps improved input latency and performance.
If I were to go there, I’d go MiSTer or a clone instead, and save a load of cash in the process. You’ll get an A1200 level + AGA performance, and this ought to cover by far most of the content from the Amiga scene.
And for anyone who doesn't mind going down a massive rabbithole there are many variants of Minimig, the original FPGA-based recreation of the Amiga - most of which are on more affordable hardware than the Vampire - and open-source to boot.
The versions which have a soft-CPU are significantly slower than the Vampire - but for my money feel more authentic as a result. The versions which use a real 68000 CPU are slower still - but I think the version which combines an FPGA for chipset and an actual PiStorm for CPU is currently the fastest nearly-an-Amiga...
The Vampire is way overpriced and the extensions it adds are useless because they only work on other Vamprire machines. The PiStorm is much, much cheaper, and emulates a standard 68k while continuing to use the Amiga chipset.
As someone that was the only PC guy among a group of friends all Amiga owners, I don't think these systems do justice to the original systems.
What made Amiga great was the 1980- mid 1990's landscape of computers, 30 years later it is hardly any different from running an emulator, even if modern OSes still lack features present on AmigaOS.
The vampire v4 is too proprietary, has too many incompatibilities and there's way too much drama around it, besides costing an arm and a leg.
For a modern FPGA setup, I'd look at miSTer. There's an excellent miniMig core for it, complete with AGA support, and it is open source hardware.
The Vampire people really turned me, and likely many others, off when they tried to argue that FPU emulation isn't important and that hardly anything uses the FPU, rather than simply saying they weren't going to work on it then.
When you try to use bullshit to make excuses, people notice.
After that, they said the MMU isn't important, and that being fully m680x0 compatible isn't really as important as other things.
Didn't the original Amiga MC68000 use soft-FP anyway? Not sure why this would matter.
The issue, I guess, is that the Vampire sits in this weird space where they've picked a pretty arbitrary cutoff in which classic hardware they care about - most users who stuck with the Amiga for a long time would have had an accelerator with an M68k with an FPU, and MMU.
At the same time the Vampire extends the 68k instruction set and chipset in various ways. So it reflects this very opinionated "alternate history" version of what the Amiga could've been that involves ignoring a lot of what was.
I find the Vampire fascinating, and would quite like one (but maybe not enough to fork out what they're asking for it) but I realise I probably wouldn't use it much - it's mostly interesting because it's a fun oddity.
I'd have loved a Vampire-like machine that actually tried to take things forward across the board. I'm happy to see them experiment with 68k extensions, but I'd have loved to see them match the "full" classic experience with FPU and MMU first.
But it's their project - they're of course free to do what they want.
I think this the best analysis of the Vampire. To my mind it is more of an Amiga-compatible computer (with some odd graphics and CPU incompatibilities) than it is an actual extension of any Amiga platform ideas or plans.
Their odd instance on sticking with the "chipset architecture" also ensures it'll never be anything other than a niche device within a retro-computing niche.
I agree that it would indeed be more interesting if their 68080 actually extended the 68060 rather than branching off from the 68000. And their sAGA/Maggie architecture is a real deadend for programmers if, as they claim, they want to reignite Amiga's popularity. Commodore themselves understood that OCS/AGA was a deadend and designed their Hombre specification to replace it. If they implemented a 64bit version of Hombre than would be an intriguing thing I think.
Though frankly why you wouldn't just design for PCI based GPUs is anyone's guess but then you kind of have to admit your whole platform would just be better off being a PC
I mean, sure, but, as the Vampire makes clear in its name... it's not an Amiga, it's its own thing, wearing the Amiga's skin as a hat. You can also stick a Raspberry Pi running E-UAE inside an Amiga case for pretty much the same thing (a thing that's definitely not an Amiga, emulating being an Amiga, in the shell of an Amiga)
older accelerators still work and are great compatibility-wise of course, there's also terrible fire which is great. I'd put Vampire the last actually, in-part due to compatibility and as you've said it.. you can pretty much do the thing with RPI and heck, you can even have rpi as an accelerator within an amiga - PiStorm.
I have three A1200s, two A600s, and an A500+. In each A1200 I have in order of least to most powerful: Blizzard 1230 with 030+FPU, Blizzard 1260 with 060, and TF1260 with 060. If I'm after most compatibility and games, it's 1230 that gets out. B1230 is just plug and play, you put it into Amiga and it's faster. That's it. With 1260 both Blizzard and TF you have to install stuff, play with it etc. It's good for demos and demo coding where target always is anyways Blizzard 1260. In A600 I have one stock and one with Furia with 030. A500+ is stock (actually A500 reworked to be A500+). Technically that's the full circle of it. There's no new stuff made for it or advantage of more power than this. Demos are made for 060 anyways. I also have PCMCIA cards with WiFi on them so that I can move stuff to amigas over the air, or even remote execute code.
Aside from ALL OF THAT (including a bunch of 1084s monitors), I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. I boot it up, it's an amiga, has all the crap on it and most of it works immediately. What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was. That's what I'd recommend anyone wanting to get a bit into it outside of WinUAE on their own comp.
> ...I have RPI 400 on which I have installed an emulator. It gets most use out of all of the above. ... What's also cool is it's a computer in a keyboard with a mouse, just like amiga was.
Worth noting that the RPi 500 is also out now, with much improved performance. It's the most "home computer"-like thingy on the market, so it goes quite well with that kind of usage.
RPi 500
Oh, I haven't been paying attention, haven't realized this came out in the meantime! Thanks
Worth looking into pimiga and amiberry, if using raspberry pi for Amiga emulation.
Of course, retroarch has an Amiga emulator as well.
>A stock Amiga 600 can play a Commander Keen-style game just as smoothly as a faster PC.
Look... comparing Amiga platformers to Commander Keen is insulting. Amiga had "Genesis style games" not "Commander Keen style games"
Amiga games looked and sounded like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFtLGDywZlg
Not this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iKHUOKVzo0Q
>just as smoothly as a faster PC
No. actually smooth, unlike a PC.
One game frame per each frame sent to the screen. Which the PC would only achieve many years later when it got raw power via 3d acceleration.
AIUI the main limitation with early PC graphics was (1) it was a dumb framebuffer and (2) bandwidth from the system to said framebuffer was too low to replace the entire screen in a single frame. This only really got solved comprehensively in the late 1990s or so, hence prior to that timeframe you were always more or less relying on some kind of "trick" to achieve smooth video output.
And Keen 4 was more fun.
Politely disagree.
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Nice article, the A600 was indeed a strange machine to be released between the A500+ and A1200, and the PCMCIA port was a curious choice at the time.
Some thoughts:
* Commodore could have added a faster 68000, and it seems like a good idea in theory. But in order for a faster CPU to have any meaningful impact, they would have needed to add either a sizeable cache or, preferably, some real fastmem (memory that isn't shared with the custom graphics and audio hardware). This would have raised the cost significantly.
* The text doesn't mention the Amiga 500 Plus, also released in 1992, just before the A600. It was an upgraded A500 featuring Kickstart 2.0, the ECS chipset and 1 meg of chipmem. People who had bought an A500+ felt fooled by Commodore, and rightly so: Adding a hard drive to the A600 meant the cost of a stand-alone 2.5" IDE drive. Adding one to an A500/+ involved a sidecar expansion that cost about as much as the computer itself.
* The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
* It wasn't really fully software-compatible with the A500. In part because of the newer Kickstart, in part because of the lack of the A500's peculiar "slowfast" memory that many games took for granted, and in part because of the newer ECS chipset. The same problems afflicted the A500+, and meant that large amounts of already existing games just didn't work. This was the fault of the software houses, sure, but gamers looking for a good deal didn't care; they'd rather buy a second-hand A500 than gamble with an incompatible machine that offered no significant hardware upgrade.
* People in the know who were on the market for an Amiga in 1993 or 1994 probably bought an A1200.
> * The A600 was squeezed in between the A500+ and the A1200, which means that in 1993, you could buy an A500+ for £199, an A600 for £199 or an A1200 for £299 - all of them supposed entry-level machines. Very confusing for consumers.
If commodore loved anything it was to release products designed to compete with themselves.
I honestly can't tell if it was stupid or genius of them, on a corporate level, to sell cheap PC:s that directly competed with Amigas in the home segment. On the one hand, they helped usher in the demise of their own cash cow. On the other hand, there was no shortage of competition from other home PC manufacturers.
And nothing wrong with that if done correctly, but Commodore confused its customers.
Having different products for different market segments is often a good idea. But in many cases Commodore released simultaneous products to compete for the same market segment.
I might be biased as the A600 was the first computer I bought with my own money, but there was no way I would have bought a 386SX over the A600.
This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
I used to play Wolfenstein 3D on a friend's PC. They certainly did not pay anything like what I had, but within a year or so they would have had to upgrade as well. The thing is I could do more with my A600 than most people who used a pc. One the games were there and the games were great to play, the first game I bought for the A600 was almost all I needed for Sensible Soccer, soon to be upgraded to SWOS. but there were probably 50 - 100 games that were just amazing. Photo and Video Editing, Making Music all in 1992 in fact the A600 kept me going way into 1999. I then bought a A1200 but it was not the same...
Saga and Nintendo were the challange to the Amiga, I am not saying Doom did not have a big effect but I think we just assumed there would be a release at some point.
Three words, plug and play!
I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
I got an Amiga Format magazine in the hope that the 3 half inch disks would fit into my home computer. (( they didn't half an inch out )) lol It showcased the A600 and the style of the machine was so much better for the time than the A500 it looked sharp and new I ended up buying it within weeks or month or so.
The A500, A600 and A1200 are all prone to discoloration....
I still have two A600's and one A1200 and all of them are still working, not bad for a computer that is 33 years old and took a battering for many years.
:)
Nah, I was an Amiga 500 user in Europe at the time and was looking at maybe getting an Amiga 2000 or 3000, but with VGA games like Comanche and Ultima VII being released on PC, great IDEs like Turbo Pascal/C/C++ available, the value proposition of the Amiga just wasn't really there anymore, the writing was on the wall. And so with a heavy heart I bought a 486DX instead. I agree insofar as I wouldn't have opted for a 386SX.
Pretty much exactly the same - I was at university at the time and heard of this slackware Linux thing - my Amiga was hardly used after that.
> This article is so tilted towards the American market and that's fine.
The author is from the US and is relating his experience that what he saw around him at the time. Every article I read about the Amiga from someone in the UK or EU is also "tilted" based on their experiences. There was no global experience when it came to the Amiga, other than it started in the US first and died in the UK/EU. By the time the 1200 made a big splash overseas, the US was well down another path - the road that ultimately became everyone's. So there's a time-shift at play and a regional one. How that played into the PC/Mac market in their respective regions is really up to economics at the time.
>I do wish Commodore would have released the A1200 in the A600's package if they had. I probably would not have been able to buy it.
Agree about wishing AGA was way too little, way too late. I wish they'd released it no later than 1990 rather than the end of 1992. Maybe then Commodore could have kept the massive US market's interest longer than they did. The choices Commodore made, well... it's no wonder what happened, happened.
Doom was indeed the death knell of the Amiga - most Amiga games were still targeting ECS due to market share and were pretty much rehashes of old titles.
Doom came along and was the first PC game that was standout with "must have" wow factor. I remember spending hours late one night getting 3 person multi player working via some ghetto IPX over serial hack.
I remember spending my whole years (part-time) work salary on an Amiga 4000 in 1993 or 94. I miss that computer. But man, my then girlfriend (now wife) was pretty horrified that I spent so much money on a computer… I don’t remember what other plans she had for my money, haha.
The big issue was less technical and more market based. I remember in 92 you could easily get an Amiga 500 for under $500 that this sold for. People were upgrading and stores were doing clearances of old stock. So it competed with a flood of Amiga 500s.
The article doesn't mention the recent development in Amiga extension cards - PiStorm is an easy (and affordable) way to max out the specs of any Amiga, A600 included.
I think MNT / mntre also have some Amiga expansion cards for graphics and sound. For me I'll keep my memories for fear of being disappointed. Maybe if the mini had included shadow of the beast, lemmings, bubble bobble, great ghiana sisters, I might have been more tempted. But then I would have wanted devpac and a true 680n0 chip + the fun chiplets to play with.
I never heard of a graphics card for the Amiga until a decade later. In 92 I bought a IBM clone that cost 1/2 the price of an Amiga. One of my roommates had an Amiga 1000, and he got another 600 when it came out. In 96, I got one in trade for a Macintosh, while the roommate and I both got Lucas Acellerators and IDE interfaces for pennies on the dollar. We played games that used the serial ports. We had 1mb of chip ram and 2 mb of fast ram, the price of which was falling fast.
I think the lucas boards were 25mhz MC68030,and within a few weeks,we had gotten 33mhz parts w/ FPUs and soldered on new crystals. Such an incredible source of cheap fun, while the I world was struggling with widows 1,2,3. The Amiga was, as was claimed, head and hands above the PC until the 486s became cheap 8~10 years later. Amigas ruled. Too bad commodore were such schmucks.
Reddit discussions about the same article: https://www.reddit.com/r/amiga/comments/1jcrtct/amiga_600_th...
https://archive.ph/17oZA
I've had a stock A600 for over a decade, it was okay. Sure I had to run a ReloKick for some games but the OS was vastly superior to the awful blue-orange flat shading ugly 1.3 topaz font hell of A500. Sure A500+ existed but over here (central europe) it was very rare and it was missing the IDE port anyway. Ironically for me the greatest issue was lack of the numpad, which caused issues with some software, and forced a very lasting aversion to numpad usage on me.
From today's perspective, A600 is... annoying, which I've found out a few years ago. The architecture choices are hard to work with: the PCMCIA slot limits the amount of memory you can work with (well, unless you don't want to use it but it's almost indispensable, esp. for data transfer), the internal bus only accepts "slow" RAM - the desired Fast RAM (CPU exclusive) can only be added by expansions put directly over the CPU itself. Sure, there are Vampires and PiStorms but the compatibility of both can be a bit spotty, and if you're dumping that much on the system you must love it specifically, lest you'd just go with an A1200 which is superior in every respect.
On that note, currently the easiest no-brainer Amiga to actually have fun with without eating your budget too much is an A1200. Slap an 8MB fast ram expansion, an IDE CF controller, and 3.2.2 OS/ROM it's ready to go. WHDLoad installs exist for every important game and many obscure ones too, data transfer can go either via PCMCIA>CF card, or a Parallel Port contraption that reads microSD cards. And if you want more power (though I can't imagine why, unless you want to run Doom on it), TerribleFire cards aren't too pricey. 128MB RAM + 030/060 CPU is a substantial boost (note: games, especially early 3D, will break with that much power).
Just watch for leaky capacitors (thankfully there's a whole industry for fixing this), and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore).
> and for the love of god don't use the stock A1200 PSU, it'll kill your system (thanks Commodore)
That is definitely a Commodore tradition. I had a C64 back that had a PSU die in 1985 and took out all of the DRAM chips.
It isn't true though. C64 PSUs would fail high and fry downstream chips and passives. Amiga PSUs are designed to fail low, and with the exception of some exceptionally rare faults, they won't fry your computer if the capacitors fail
It fried mine, twice in a row. Lost the A600, which came with A1200 PSU, and then an A500 to a different PSU. Additionally, the second(ary) issue with A1200 PSU is it's barely strong enough to support the base hardware configuration and will make expanded systems unstable.
Your PSU issues aren't actually all that common. The A1200 PSU being trash was a prime example of commodore's decades long costing cutting horrors.
I owned an Amiga 600 when I was a kid, absolutely loved it! A great gaming machine.
Those complaints ring true. I had one and you ran into its limitations almost immediately, but that would not likely be an issue were it not for the fact that not everything was compatible between a500, a1200 and a600. But even that wasn't the biggest issue. The most amusing issue, in retrospect -- I hated this as a kid, was lack of full keyboard, because, please try not to laugh, I could not play civilization properly since it had no numpad. It was years later before I could enjoy moving diagonally. Eh, to be a child again.
The A500 and A600 are near identical. The tiny differences between them are in fact not incompatibilities in that sense. The A1200 is quite a different upgrade, and software making use of its new custom hardware features (or 68020-specific instructions) will obviously not run on the A600/500+/500, though the A1200 will run any correctly written piece of software from the past.
I've always seen A600 more like a budget version of A1200 rather than a new variant of A500: better graphics chip, IDE port, PCMCIA and new look-and-feel of the Workbench 2.04 (at the first sight hardly distinguishable from the Workbench 3.0) gave a taste of something new.
I feel that "budget A1200" is a misnomer. The IDE port was its strongest addition, but internally it's still just an A500 with ECS instead of OCS, and that never really panned out as leverage. Not even the additional 512KB of chipmem made a splash. No more than a handful of titles, productivity and games alike, took any advantage of it. Incomparable to the upgrade seen with AGA and a 14 MHz 020.
Sure, in terms of hardware, it was a slightly better A500, and you could plug it into better monitors than the A1080, and you could finally get "normal" IDE HDDs which were a fraction of the cost of SCSI HDDs with some expensive third party adapter.
But also, Kickstart/Workbench 2.0 was a million miles better than 1.3, and it opened access to a lot of very cool software. Even though the A1200 and A4000 got KS/WB 3.0, most new software remained compatible with 2.0, and only used 3.0's APIs for bonus functionality... the big leap was from 1.3 to 2.0
(of course, if you were purely game-brained, you'd probably be complaining that your A500+ or A600 didn't run KS1.3... bleh, you had enough RAM to softkick it if you wanted)
Those who were "demo/intro-brained" (the demo scene being the 2nd largest user segment) were unaffected.
Commodore actually did release an official KS2.0x ROM upgrade for the A500.
The A500+ already had ECS graphics, up to 2MB chip ram & Kick 2.04
Indeed, it is a shame that the A600 didn't come with Kickstart/Workbench 3.x.
It had other improvements than just support for the AGA chipset's video modes. "Datatypes" were pretty neat. Thanks to it, the Amiga got PNG support in all web browsers before many other platforms got it at all.
If I remember correctly most of the 600s compatibility issues could be worked around by adjusting settings via _early startup control system_. Eg by switching off newer hardware features.
My god, have you looked up the price of an Amiga on eBay in response to this thread? I did and it’s horrifying.
Yeah, prices have shot way up over the last 2-3 years, and not just for the big-box Amigas, even A1200 prices have got fairly silly. But people have a whole lot of love for the Amiga, it was a revolutionary machine at the time, and for many people it was their introduction to doing creative things with computers, as well as the gaming.
And retro gaming/computing is a growing hobby. There's so much new hardware and software out there for old platforms now, letting you add never-before-possible upgrades (e.g. PiStorm for the Amiga), get decent output to a modern TV, and sometimes give them shiny new cases and keyboards. Which is great if you already had a collection of retro machines, but not so much if you're trying to buy them now, with increased demand and ever diminishing supply.
Is USD 1-1.2k for a clean, recapped Amiga 1200, with newest ROMs, updated PS and TF '030 accelerator horrifying? If so, call me a fool!
(FWIW, I acquired mine two years ago, and it looks like recent sales on ebay are in the same ballpark...)
They've been horrifying since about 2020. I could sell up and put my kids through a good college!
NeXT workstations and cubes on eBay are also quite ridiculous, compared to what they were 15 or 20 years ago.
Interesting.
Also, the article mentions the AGA chip with no introduction of it. Some sort of editing mix up?
AI was not there, not trained properly. Let it go back to writing code.
Meh. Whole Amiga concept was a glorified game console for PAL/NTSC TV standard. Once PC market moved aboive using TV monitors, whole Amiga lineup was doomed.
As anything Commodore ever did, Amiga was far overengineered for what it did.
That being said, there are only two Amigas worth remembering: - A500 as original one ( A1000 was overpriced crap) - A1200 as a cheap successor. Its upgrade value was "meh", but it was cheap. And there were games, actually using those extras. And it had a cheap HDD option (used an IDE drive).
The Amiga brought us DPaint, OctaMED, AMOS, Blitz Basic, and a whole lot more.
People bought it for the games, then got interested in the creative possibilities. At the very least it inspired a generation of game developers, digital artists, and electronic music creators.
Meanwhile, many PCs of the time only had PC speaker audio capabilities, the horrible palette of EGA, and the inability to scroll the screen smoothly. And a DOS prompt rather than a smoothly-multitasking GUI.
Yes, there were only a few short years before the PC caught up/overtook the Amiga. But for those few years, the Amiga was something really special.
It wasn't overengineered, it was well engineered.
It was cheaper than a PC and much nicer to use - Windows was terrible in that era, the janky mouse jumping all over the place under load due to no hardware sprite and serial buffer overrun.
Meanwhile an Amiga under 100% CPU would have a silky smooth mouse due to hardware mouse port tracking and sprite pointer.
Then you had stuff like autoconfig hardware that was 10 years ahead of its time.
Except the system was designed with a productivity display oriented RGB port that worked, and its main selling point was the hardware, not the games. My stock 1200 can output 1440x550 res and more, and it works just fine.
Deluxe Paint, tracker music, Video Toaster w/Lightwave, all Amiga achievements. And all systems were extremely good value for the dollar until late VGA era. Europe understood and appreciated that; US unfortunately had Commodore main branch, which was very self-sabotaging, to put it mlildly.
"Productivity oriented RGB display"...
I remember going through a TON of pirated SW to get useful PCB CAD programs on Amiga (being the graphic "beast" of the time) and wasted a ton on non-PC harware (basically everything from Sinclair QL to Atari ST lines and Amigas, from 500 to 1200) only to admit defeat years later and settle on plain old DOS PC and Tango.
Amiga was ATROCIOUS for everything besides gaming. Its graphics was great only on paper - until you had it on the desk and havign to use it daily.