The Amiga 600, also known as the A600, and full title Commodore Amiga 600, 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.
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 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 properly or at all on A600 or later. A program, Relokick, was released (and included with the March 1993 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.
Development and release
After the release of the Amiga 3000T, Commodore's next project was a next-generation Amiga chipset, which became the Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). Concurrently, engineers Dave Haynie, Jeff Porter, and Eric Lavitsky began work on Amiga 3000+, which would have been the first computer to use the AGA chipset, and Joe Augenbraun was behind the Amiga 1000+, which also would have used the chipset. Meanwhile, George Robbins designed another low-end project called the Amiga 300. The computer, codenamed June Bug, had a floppy drive built in and was roughly the same size and weight as a Commodore 64. Development took a turn on all three projects when Ali dismissed the engineering management team and appointed former IBM executive Bill Sydnes as the company's engineering manager. Sydnes canceled the A1000+ and A3000+ models and delayed the AGA chipset, but simply changed the A300's design goals.
The model was launched in mid-March 1992 as the Amiga 600, superseding the A500. Units were manufactured in Commodore's production plants in Irvine, Scotland; Braunschweig, Germany; Kwai Chung, Hong Kong; and the Philippines. In the United States, it and its hard disk drive variant, the Amiga 600HD, sold for and , respectively,
The machine is reported to have sold 193,000 units in Germany.
Bundled software
In addition to the stock A600, mouse, power supply, and Workbench disk package, the A600 was available with the following software and hardware bundles:
- 'Lemmings' bundle (1992): Lemmings and the Electronic Arts graphics package Deluxe Paint III
- 'Robocop 3D' bundle (1992): Robocop 3D, Myth, Shadow of the Beast III, Graphic Workshop and Microtext
- 'Wild, Weird and Wicked' bundle (late 1992, £349 launch price): Formula One Grand Prix, Pushover, Putty and Deluxe Paint III
- A600HD 'Epic/Language' bundle (late 1992, £499 launch price): including an internal 20 MB hard disk drive, Deluxe Paint III, a word processor, Trivial Pursuit, Myth, Rome and Epic
Graphics and sound
The A600 is the last Amiga model to use Commodore's Enhanced Chip Set (ECS), which can address 2 MB of Amiga Chip RAM and adds higher resolution display modes. The so-called Super Agnus display chip can drive screen modes varying from 320×200 pixels to 1280×512 pixels, with different frequency sync. As with the original Amiga chipset, up to 32 colors can be displayed from a 12-bit (4096 color) palette at lower display resolutions. An extra-half-bright mode offers 64 simultaneous colors by allowing each of the 32 colors in the palette to be dimmed to half brightness. Additionally, a 4096-color "HAM" mode can be used at lower resolutions. At higher resolutions, such as 800×600i, only 4 simultaneous colors can be displayed.
Sound was unchanged from the original Amiga design, namely, 4 DMA-driven 8-bit channels, with two channels for the left speaker and two for the right.
The A600 was the first Amiga model since the original Amiga 1000 with built-in color composite video (RCA), which allowed the A600 to be used with a standard CRT television without the need for a Commodore A520 RF Modulator adaptor.