Amiga 600
The Amiga 600, also known as the A600, is a home computer introduced in March 1992. It is the final Amiga model based on the Motorola 68000 and the 1990 Amiga Enhanced Chip Set. A redesign of the Amiga 500 Plus, it adds the option of an internal hard disk drive and a PCMCIA port. Lacking a numeric keypad, the A600 is only slightly larger than an IBM PC keyboard, weighing approximately 6 pounds (2.72kg). It shipped with AmigaOS 2.0, which was considered more user-friendly than earlier versions of the operating system.
An Amiga 600 computer | |
| Manufacturer | Commodore |
|---|---|
| Type | Home computer |
| Release date | March 1992 |
| Introductory price |
|
| Discontinued | 1993 |
| Units sold | 193,000 units in Germany |
| Operating system | AmigaOS 2.05 (up to 3.2 with ROM replacement and 3.9 with CPU upgrade) |
| CPU | Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz 7.09 MHz (PAL) |
| Memory | 1 MB (80 ns access time) (6 MB maximum, more with unofficial expansions) |
| Predecessor | Amiga 500, Amiga 500 Plus |
| Related | Amiga 1200 |
Like the A500, the A600 was aimed at the lower end of the market. Commodore intended it to revitalize sales of the A500-related line before the introduction of the 32-bit Amiga 1200. According to Dave Haynie, the A600 "was supposed to be US$50–60 cheaper than the A500, but it came in at about that much more expensive." The A600 was originally to have been numbered the A300, positioning it as a lower-budget version of the Amiga 500 Plus.
An A600HD model was sold with an internal 2.5" ATA hard disk drive of either 20 or 40 MB.
Due to the inclusion of Kickstart 2.05, many software titles made for A1000 or A500 do not work on A600. A program, Relokick, was released (and included with an issue of CU Amiga) which loaded a Kickstart 1.3 ROM image into memory and booted the machine into Kickstart 1.3, allowing most incompatible software to run. Because Relokick itself occupies 512 KB of memory, some titles would not work unless the A600 was fitted with a 1 MB trapdoor memory expansion.