Details about Amiga 600
The Amiga 600 is a budget computer from the Amiga family, produced from 1992 to 1993.
The developers tried to make a fully functional copy of the previous models amig 500, 500+ and 2000, but in the most compact low-cost version.
This amiga has an ECS chipset, and belongs to the first generations of classic amig.
This is a computer from my childhood; it was this kind of amiga that I had in 1993. The first "branded" computer, after many years spent for a homemade Spectrum.
')
Processor: Motorolla 68000 7.16 MHz (16/32 bit)
Memory: 1 MB
Video: Agnus / Denise chips, from 320x200 16 colors (from palette 4096), up to 1280 × 512 4 colors, plus slow ham mode (320 * 200 * 4096 colors)
Sound: Palula chip, stereo, 4 hardware channels 8 bit.
Drives: 3.5 "880 KB DS / DD
Winchester: optional.
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 quite a few games for two players on joysticks, and a certain amount for two mice.
- on the back wall a full set of ports:
port for external drives (3 more drives could be added under the chain), printer, serial, stereo audio, RGB video, composite, RF and power connector.
- on the left side only pcmcia connector.
In general, the machine is very compact, a little more Spectrum and a bit heavier.
In childhood, many times she was taken to her dacha, or to visit friends, various video outputs made it possible without difficulty to connect to almost any TV.
Open the top cover:
Inside, everything is quite ascetic, one board, drive. In the cover on the latches remains the keyboard and the LED unit.
On the right side of the board we see:
- top of the comb piece - ide connector for connecting 2.5 "hard drive (44 pin)
- in the center - Motorolla 68000 processor
- under the processor - a kickstart chip, it is almost like a bios on a PC, only the core and libraries of the Amiga OS are contained.
- to the right of the kickstart gayle chip, it is responsible for the ide controller, though only pio 0 can.
- Above the gayle is the agnus chip, it is responsible for 25 system DMA and addressing onboard memory. It also contains a blit chip - a video chip that allows you to copy pieces of video memory twice as fast as the CPU does.
On the left side:
- in the middle is the 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 onboard memory.
- at the very bottom is visible the trapdoor connector, for installing various extensions, but since Amiga 600 focused on the budget market, on this connector signals are only divorced for memory expansion.
The first thing I add is the hard drive.
The CompactFlash card, through the CF-IDE adapter, will act as a hard disk. It is fast enough, silent and is not afraid of mechanical vibration during operation.
In general, the operating system itself and all the software for such an Amga is quite compact, the axis is 3-6 floppy disks of 800 kilobytes, many games 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, most likely you can fit on 4GB if not all, then most games released for all time for OCS / ECS amig. Amiga sold immediately with the hard drive "Amiga600 HD" was equipped with a 40 MB hard drive.
First, install AmigaOS 2.1 on it.
Video with loading axis:
The operating system is loaded from the screw in 30 seconds (the limitation is a weak disk controller and processor, the speed is more than 600 kilobytes / sec not to get). Further work with icons and launch the Directory Opus file manager is visible.
Then I will expand a little Amigo
First of all, let's borrow a trapdor slot with a relying expansion of the base (chip) memory, by purchasing and installing such a board, recently released by the German company individual computers:
This will add us another 1 MB of memory. Unfortunately, due to the architectural limitations of chipsets larger than 2 megabytes of chip memory in the Amiga, it cannot be established.
But you can add memory, addressed directly by the processor.
A couple of years ago, comrade lvd, a group of nedo-pc, developed and released its own memory extension for the Amiga 600:
it has a cot attached directly to the processor, and contains 8 megabytes of additional (fast) memory. Because the processor’s address space is limited and it overlaps with various devices (for example, the pcmcia address space), I will use only 5.5 megabytes.
Install memory on the processor. It looks like this:
(a piece of paper tape is stuck on ide-cf in the background, so as not to shortly)
General view of the interior after installing everything:
This is not the maximum upgrade. There were also accelerators, with faster processors, it is also possible to add usb to Amiga, an additional sound card, etc., but I think that the memory expansion and hard disk removes the main bottlenecks of the machine for comfortable work, and by and large the rest is very optional.
We close Amiga, connect all cables, add a pcmcia network card. On the table:
the relative sizes are visible - the amiga is shorter than the genius keyboard lying on the monitor.
First, let's install a slightly more modern AmigaOS 3.1
To do this, in the boot script, the first line to put the program that loads the new version of kickstart in memory, and activates it. After this line, Amiga reboots with a new kickstart and you can install another AmigaOS.
We go online:
On the video: under AmigaOS 3.1, I start the TCP / IP stack Miami first, then load the AWeb browser.
I open Google in 16 colors.
I show multitasking, despite the brakes of the browser, the rest of the system is efficient, it responds pretty quickly and has decently free memory.
It should be noted 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 under the Amiga, much faster, and quite usable even on such weak Amiga.
Since the system costs a lot of memory, you can download games not from diskettes, but with the help of a special WHDLoad emulator, which keeps images of diskettes in memory, and slips the games you need as they load.
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, will display a splash screen, asking you to insert a boot diskette.
For example, I insert a floppy with a popular Amiga demo.
Amiga without a hard drive remains comfortable enough to work. The video shows the download of the ProTracker music editor from one floppy disk, then the loading of the module from another, switching to the AmigaOS console, with the tracker running.
It was a brief insight 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 amiga as the main machine for networking. Here is a screenshot of comrade mr_a500's 16-color desktop from amiga.org:
The developers tried to make a fully functional copy of the previous models amig 500, 500+ and 2000, but in the most compact low-cost version.
This amiga has an ECS chipset, and belongs to the first generations of classic amig.
This is a computer from my childhood; it was this kind of amiga that I had in 1993. The first "branded" computer, after many years spent for a homemade Spectrum.
Specifications
')
Processor: Motorolla 68000 7.16 MHz (16/32 bit)
Memory: 1 MB
Video: Agnus / Denise chips, from 320x200 16 colors (from palette 4096), up to 1280 × 512 4 colors, plus slow ham mode (320 * 200 * 4096 colors)
Sound: Palula chip, stereo, 4 hardware channels 8 bit.
Drives: 3.5 "880 KB DS / DD
Winchester: optional.
Outside
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 quite a few games for two players on joysticks, and a certain amount for two mice.
- on the back wall a full set of ports:
port for external drives (3 more drives could be added under the chain), printer, serial, stereo audio, RGB video, composite, RF and power connector.
- on the left side only pcmcia connector.
In general, the machine is very compact, a little more Spectrum and a bit heavier.
In childhood, many times she was taken to her dacha, or to visit friends, various video outputs made it possible without difficulty to connect to almost any TV.
Inside
Open the top cover:
Inside, everything is quite ascetic, one board, drive. In the cover on the latches remains the keyboard and the LED unit.
On the right side of the board we see:
- top of the comb piece - ide connector for connecting 2.5 "hard drive (44 pin)
- in the center - Motorolla 68000 processor
- under the processor - a kickstart chip, it is almost like a bios on a PC, only the core and libraries of the Amiga OS are contained.
- to the right of the kickstart gayle chip, it is responsible for the ide controller, though only pio 0 can.
- Above the gayle is the agnus chip, it is responsible for 25 system DMA and addressing onboard memory. It also contains a blit chip - a video chip that allows you to copy pieces of video memory twice as fast as the CPU does.
On the left side:
- in the middle is the 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 onboard memory.
- at the very bottom is visible the trapdoor connector, for installing various extensions, but since Amiga 600 focused on the budget market, on this connector signals are only divorced for memory expansion.
Work in the operating system
The first thing I add is the hard drive.
The CompactFlash card, through the CF-IDE adapter, will act as a hard disk. It is fast enough, silent and is not afraid of mechanical vibration during operation.
In general, the operating system itself and all the software for such an Amga is quite compact, the axis is 3-6 floppy disks of 800 kilobytes, many games 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, most likely you can fit on 4GB if not all, then most games released for all time for OCS / ECS amig. Amiga sold immediately with the hard drive "Amiga600 HD" was equipped with a 40 MB hard drive.
First, install AmigaOS 2.1 on it.
Video with loading axis:
The operating system is loaded from the screw in 30 seconds (the limitation is a weak disk controller and processor, the speed is more than 600 kilobytes / sec not to get). Further work with icons and launch the Directory Opus file manager is visible.
Upgrade
Then I will expand a little Amigo
First of all, let's borrow a trapdor slot with a relying expansion of the base (chip) memory, by purchasing and installing such a board, recently released by the German company individual computers:
This will add us another 1 MB of memory. Unfortunately, due to the architectural limitations of chipsets larger than 2 megabytes of chip memory in the Amiga, it cannot be established.
But you can add memory, addressed directly by the processor.
A couple of years ago, comrade lvd, a group of nedo-pc, developed and released its own memory extension for the Amiga 600:
it has a cot attached directly to the processor, and contains 8 megabytes of additional (fast) memory. Because the processor’s address space is limited and it overlaps with various devices (for example, the pcmcia address space), I will use only 5.5 megabytes.
Install memory on the processor. It looks like this:
(a piece of paper tape is stuck on ide-cf in the background, so as not to shortly)
General view of the interior after installing everything:
This is not the maximum upgrade. There were also accelerators, with faster processors, it is also possible to add usb to Amiga, an additional sound card, etc., but I think that the memory expansion and hard disk removes the main bottlenecks of the machine for comfortable work, and by and large the rest is very optional.
Demonstration
We close Amiga, connect all cables, add a pcmcia network card. On the table:
the relative sizes are visible - the amiga is shorter than the genius keyboard lying on the monitor.
First, let's install a slightly more modern AmigaOS 3.1
To do this, in the boot script, the first line to put the program that loads the new version of kickstart in memory, and activates it. After this line, Amiga reboots with a new kickstart and you can install another AmigaOS.
We go online:
On the video: under AmigaOS 3.1, I start the TCP / IP stack Miami first, then load the AWeb browser.
I open Google in 16 colors.
I show multitasking, despite the brakes of the browser, the rest of the system is efficient, it responds pretty quickly and has decently free memory.
It should be noted 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 under the Amiga, much faster, and quite usable even on such weak Amiga.
Since the system costs a lot of memory, you can download games not from diskettes, but with the help of a special WHDLoad emulator, which keeps images of diskettes in memory, and slips the games you need as they load.
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, will display a splash screen, asking you to insert a boot diskette.
For example, I insert a floppy with a popular Amiga demo.
Amiga without a hard drive remains comfortable enough to work. The video shows the download of the ProTracker music editor from one floppy disk, then the loading of the module from another, switching to the AmigaOS console, with the tracker running.
It was a brief insight 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 amiga as the main machine for networking. Here is a screenshot of comrade mr_a500's 16-color desktop from amiga.org:
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/90611/
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