Details on the Amiga 600

    Amiga 600 is a budget computer from the Amiga family, manufactured from 1992 to 1993.
    The developers tried to make a fully functional copy of the previous Amiga 500, 500+ and 2000 models, but in the most compact, inexpensive version.
    This amiga has an ECS chipset, and belongs to the first generations of classic amiga. This is a computer from my childhood, it was such an amiga that I had in 1993. The first "brand" computer, after many years spent on a makeshift Spectrum.





    Specifications


    Processor: Motorolla 68000 7.16 MHz (16/32 bit)
    Memory: 1 MB
    Video: Agnus / Denise chips, from 320x200 16 colors (from the 4096 palette), up to 1280 × 512 4 colors, plus slow mode ham (320 * 200 * 4096 colors)
    Sound: Palula chip, stereo, 4 hardware channels 8 bit.
    Drives: 3.5 "880 KB DS / DD
    Winchester: optional.

    Outside

    Let's look around.
    - on the right side: Slot drive, and two ports joystick / mouse. Universal ports, mice and joysticks work both there and there, there are many games for two players on the joysticks, and some for two mice. - on the back wall there is a full set of ports: a port for external drives (3 more drives could be added under the chain), a printer, serial, stereo audio, RGB video, composite, RF and a power connector. - on the left side only the pcmcia connector. In general, the machine is very compact, a little more spektrum and a bit heavier. As a child, she took with her to the country many times, or to visit friends, and a variety of video outputs made it possible to connect to almost any TV without any difficulties.













    Inside

    Open the top cover: Inside, everything is quite ascetic, one board, a drive. The keypad and LED block remain in the lid on the latches. On the right side of the board we see: - a comb piece on top - an ide connector for connecting a 2.5 "hard drive (44 pin) - in the center - a Motorolla 68000 processor - under the processor - a kickstart chip, it’s almost like a BIOS on a PC, it only contains the kernel and operating system libraries Amiga OS systems. - to the right of the kickstart, the gayle chip, it is responsible for the ide controller, although it can only pio 0. - the agnus chip is located above the gayle, it is responsible for 25 system DMAs and on-board memory addressing. It also contains a blitter chip - a video chip that allows copy pieces of video memory twice as fast as it does cpu.











    On the left side: - in the middle is a paula chip, it is responsible for 4-channel stereo sound and work with the drive. - under it, two soj chips give us 1 megabyte of on-board memory. - the trapdoor connector is visible at the very bottom, for installing various extensions, but because Amiga 600 was guided by the budget market, on this connector signals for memory expansion are divorced only.





    Work in the operating system


    The first thing I will add is the hard drive.
    The CompactFlash card will act as a hard drive via the CF-IDE adapter. It is fast enough, silent and not afraid of mechanical vibration during operation. In general, the OS itself and all the software for such an amga are quite compact, the axis is 3-6 floppy disks of 800 kilobytes, many games are on 1 floppy disk, although there are 2..6 floppy games. In general, it makes no sense to put a large disk in this amiga, on 4GB you can most likely fit if not all, then most of the games released for all time for OCS / ECS amiga. Amiga sold immediately with the Amiga600 HD hard drive was equipped with a 40 megabyte hard drive. To start, I will install AmigaOS 2.1 Video on it with the loading of the axis:








    The OS is loaded from the screw in 30 seconds (the limitation is a weak disk controller and processor, you can’t get a speed of more than 600 kilobytes / sec). Next, you can see the work with icons and launch the Directory Opus file manager.

    Upgrade

    Further, I will expand amiga a bit.

    First of all, let's take a trapdor slot with the appropriate expansion of the base (chip) memory, having bought and installed such a motherboard, released not so long ago by the German company individual computers: This will add another 1 megabyte of memory to us. Unfortunately, due to the architectural limitations of the chipsets, more than 2 megabytes of chip memory cannot be installed in the amiga. But you can add memory directly addressed by the processor. A couple of years ago, fellow lvd, the nedo-pc group, developed and released its own memory extension for Amiga 600:






    it has a crib worn directly on the processor, and contains 8 megabytes of additional (fast) memory. Because processor address space is limited and it overlaps with various devices (for example pcmcia address space), I will use only 5.5 megabytes.

    Install the memory on the processor. it looks like this: (in the background, on ide-cf, a piece of paper tape is pasted so that it does not shorten) General view of the insides after installing everything:






    This is not a maximum upgrade. There were also accelerators with faster processors, it is also possible to add usb, an additional sound card to the amiga, etc., but I think that expanding the memory and hard drive removes the main bottlenecks of the machine for comfortable work, and by and large the rest is very optional.

    Demonstration


    Close the amigu, connect all the cables, add the pcmcia network card. On the table: relative dimensions are visible - the amiga is shorter than the genius keyboard lying on the monitor. First, install a slightly more modern AmigaOS 3.1. To do this, in the boot script, put the first line in the boot script that loads the new version of kickstart into memory and activates it. After executing this line, Amiga will reboot with a new kickstart and you can install another AmigaOS. We go online:








    On the video: under AmigaOS 3.1, I first launch the Miami TCP / IP stack, then I load the AWeb browser.
    I open Google in 16 colors.
    I show multitasking, despite the browser brakes, the rest of the system is operational, responds quite quickly, and has decent free memory.
    It is worth noting that the browser is the most difficult network task for such a machine. Working with mail, ftp, irc, icq and other protocols for which clients were written for amigu is much faster, and quite usable even on such weak amiga.

    Since the system costs a lot of memory, you can download games not from floppy disks, but with the help of a special WHDLoad emulator, which keeps images of floppy disks in memory and palm off the game as needed as it loads.
    In the video, the process of launching a couple of games:


    Work without a hard drive.
    What if we don’t have a hard drive?
    In this case, Amiga, when turned on, displays a splash screen asking you to insert a bootable floppy disk.

    For example, I insert a disk with a popular amiga demo.

    Amiga without a hard drive remains comfortable enough for work. The video shows loading the ProTracker music editor from one floppy disk, then loading the module from another, switching to the AmigaOS console with the tracker running.


    It was a short digression into how we had fun at computers 17 years ago.

    UPD: despite the strong technical limitations, there are people who, a few years ago, used the early OCS / ECS amigi as the main machine for working on the network. Here is a screenshot of mr_a500’s 16-color desktop from amiga.org:

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