Commodore Amiga 600 (A600) Review

what's going on YouTube back again with another video okay so today I thought I'd give you a a quick look at my uh A600 or my mega 600 computer you've obviously seen the uh A4000 and my A500 but uh this is the the omiga that kind of sits in my games room and uh I use for playing games when I'm in the games room so I thought I'd uh give you a bit of a tour of this particular machine what's under the hood and everything like that and um yeah so uh let's just jump jump straight into it so the Amega 600 uh was the last one of the last Amigas to come out it had come out around the same time as the a1200 but it's it's the successor to the Omega 500 um and when it first came out it wasn't um wasn't received very well I guess you could say uh people were kind of a little bit annoyed that um they they had taken what they call shortcuts in order to um get this thing out the door and as far as the upgrades go from an igga 500 there really wasn't much um you did get 1 MB of Chip memory um in the box or out or out of the box I should say uh as opposed to the 512k but the Omega 500 plus uh also came with 1 megab of Chip Ram out of the box too so it had the 1 megab of Chip Ram the Motorola 68,000 of course and the clock speed was not any fast it was still clocked at 7.14 mahz and uh obviously vious ly small form factor and uh you know some some shortcuts and some some fairly kind of at the time at least uh puzzling kind of design decisions not least the uh PCM CIA Port that's on the left hand side here but as we as so uh moving around the particular unit on the right hand side we got the standard floppy drive here and we got the mouse and joystick adapters fairly standard stuff I mean that's what you normally get on an A500 and an a1200 um and on the back just moving around here we've got the uh floppy Drive connector and that's to that's to add a an external floppy drive if we wanted to do that there's a RS 232 serial port and then we have the uh parallel port for connecting up printers and stuff the audio ports left and right and this is the video the RGB connection and uh we also got a composet out and this is the connection for the RF modulator and the power connector which is standard um so a uh an Amiga 500 uh power supply will will work and fit into this particular model as well and power it on and that's exactly the same as the a1200 and as mentioned on the left hand side uh we don't have any other expansion ports except for the PC pcmcia Port which again is very very handy these days for particular add-ons that um have been made for the Amiga specifically things like um network adapters compact flash memory and um stuff like that so let's uh crack open the machine and take a look in the internals and I'll show you some of the expansions that I've got going on in this particular machine be right back all right back again I finally got the uh keyboard uh pulled off the top basically we've also got a connector down here which indicates the power and um for the LEDs that uh that on the keyboard itself so this is what we got under the hood so the first thing you'll notice is we got this floppy drive here which is um it's a refurbished uh internal floppy disc drive from amga kit um it's uh New Old Stock or whatever you call it uh works great uh the A600 and as you can see it's very very small and there's a lot of stuff going on in here so I'll just walk through things as we go uh on the left here this is the pcmc connection so basically your pcmcia cards will slot straight in internally like that and that will establish the connection we've got the Kickstart 3.1 and that is from a mega kit of course we've got the uh 4 GB compact flash drive and this is plugged into the IDE connection Port as we mentioned previously now as mentioned in the old days you would have a you could add a 20 or a 40 gig sorry a 20 or 40 Meg IDE hard drive into your Amigas and some of them came standard internally um and in this day and age everyone uses compact flash and I this is no exception I've got the 4 gear compact flash card in there and that's got classic workbench and all the whd load and all that fun stuff so that's that and then underneath the compact flash card we have and let me just uh pull this over here this is the ACA 620 EC and this is a 16 or a 17 mahz 68020 expansion accelerator card and um this is a really really uh nice piece of Kit to have it's pretty cheap on a mega kit and individual comp I think it goes for around 100 bucks maybe it's a little bit more than that maybe 120 bucks I'm not sure but um it gives you an o20 processor it gives you I believe and I I got to look at the specs again but I believe it's up to 10 Megs of additional fast memory um so it's a it's really awesome to have it's it's great for whd load and playing games and things like that now obviously it's not anywhere near as fast as a 030 or you know 40 MHz 030 040 60 class processors but um if you want a nice little boost in your performance and you have an A600 I strongly recommend picking up one of these uh in fact I would almost you know question why you wouldn't because uh these things are just totally awesome to have it it gives you extra memory and it gives you a faster processor so um you know it's it's win-win across the board and this thing plugs directly into the 68,000 slot um so if I actually pull this out um as you can see uh here's the 68,000 CPU the the default one and this is the accelerator and it just snaps directly into the 68,000 port and it basically uh hijacks or not hijacks it's probably not the right word but just takes over the the that particular um memory bus and address bace and um uses the 68020 chip which is on board which um I believe is this chip over here with which uh has uh its label crossed out of course and uh the memory's on board as well so that's the ACA 620 EC accelerator and it just snaps back into the 68,000 port and there's also a jumper to disable it if you need to do that as well um you know you could hang a switch on the case or something if you want to switch between 68,000 000 mode and o20 mode so again another awesome piece of equipment by individual computers and then we've got the trapo trapdoor expansion and we've got another couple of upgrades here uh we've got the a604 N which is um the chip ram upgrade so this basically will give us an additional 1 Mega chip RAM and bring this machine up to 2 MB of Chip Ram which is the maximum amount of Chip memory that you can have in an amga computer so we've got the chip ram upgrade as well and um there's also a couple of uh realtime clock ports that um are that available as part of this expansion as well and um you can also add things like um the individual computers uh rapid Road USB um and use that against on the clock port and I've actually done that with a rapid road that I had previously uh and that works totally fine so you can also include a USB style expansion um in an omega 600 it's pretty cool stuff um now there's obviously a ton of other expansions you can do in in your in a omega 600 um there's a couple of guys on the I believe the uh Amy Bay forums that have done some just amazing upgrades you know they' they've packed in all sorts of stuff under the case and it's it's you know I've I've seen things like 030 accelerators and sound card devices um the rapid Road stuff I mean just crammed in a whole bunch of stuff and uh it's just unbelievable seeing some of the the uh upgrades and enhancements people have done but um for me personally I'm pretty happy with this we've got the uh compact flash of course you know every amga in this day and AG should have a compact flash acceler or expansion uh or hard drive um we got the o2o accelerator we got the Kickstart 3.1 upgrade and we got the chip ram upgrade and that's all I really need um for this particular amga this is again this is just for playing games and this is um something that I use in the game room but what I want to do now is uh put this all back together connect it up and I'll show you a couple of games and show you the system and uh do a couple of benchmarks and see see it perform in action so I'll be right back so back again now we got the A600 turned on and connected up to the Commodore 1084s Monitor and this is connected via RGB of course and as you can see we've got the classic workbench going on here we've got the 2 Mega chip memory and the 10 mega fast memory and we'll just give you a quick walk around of the particular system itself um first thing that we always do here is just do some kind of CIS info to show you what we got going on under the hood but if we click on I think it's Benchmark that should tell us what we need to know that's not the one I want but um we can go into uh CIS info here and that will give you some information as you can see uh well it thinks it's a it's one of these machines it's not really sure which one it is but it's got the 68020 at 16 MHz there's no floating Point Unit no FPU in this particular machine it's an ECS chipset OS 3.1 we've got the 2 Megs of Chip memory and the 10.8 megga fast memory pal and um just the 60 HZ and all that fun stuff here's the individual computers expand ion which is the uh and do assis info of course and let's do the traditional speed test on CIS info which incidentally is isn't a particularly accurate um benchmarking tool but everyone seems to use it so uh let's kind of just walk through it we got the Kickstart 3.1 here and uh all the Resident uh libraries are load into fast memory of course to give us uh an extra speed boost we're at 3,300 dry stones and um in comparison we're 6.29 times faster than an A600 7 MHz now remember we've got the uh 6802 clocked at 18 MHz here and we got the 2 Megs of Chip memory and uh so yeah we we we got the accelerator card in there and uh we're a bit faster than the well we're four times faster than the 2000 2.7 times faster than a a1200 um now that's without any fast memory I think with fast memory the a1200 would come out to be a lot faster um the a2500 or 2500 uh o24 MHz it's just a little faster than that 1.61 times faster and uh the 030 um grade accelerators as you can see where slower at 71 of a 68325 A3000 and and .18 time uh the performance of a A4000 6804 to 25 MHz um but in itself it's a nippy little machine it's great for gaming great for WD load and uh yeah pretty cool stuff there um if we go to our drives this is our compact flash drive of course and um that's the one I wanted I'm sorry that's the compact flash drive and then do a speed test and we're about 1.6 Meg a second which is about standard um you can get IDE buffered um speed ups and things like that third party add-ons or third party Hardware that will give you better IDE performance but um yeah there's no real need for that and of course uh wouldn't be a demonstration of an Amiga without a whd load demo so uh this is iame loading up now on the A600 and um I've got all the whd load games installed so takes a little bit for the launcher to come up because I think we've got something like 22,000 on here um but let's give you a demo of uh something that's running and um probably let's pick something that uh takes advantage of an accelerator so let's take a look at something like Frontier type setup especially with that many games um but in in any case as you can see compare that to an A500 uh it runs quite nicely the the 3D vectors and this is running a little fast because we're in NTC mode so I think the music is a little faster than normal I [Music] guess the vectors obviously run quite smooth [Music] still a little jerky in some places it's certainly not sort of silky smooth like the 030 type setup but um certainly very very playable and obviously much better than the 68000 version and uh of course being whd load uh it's easier to quit out but the problem is with whd load there are some keys that are mapped to the keypad which um doesn't exist and I think this is one particular particular game that uh has that has that problem I think it's mapped to I didn't actually pay attention but it's probably mapped to number lock or or help or something like that unfortunately I I'm not able to quit it now one of the other things I wanted to show you was a tiny launcher now I've got tiny launcher um in my startup on my I think it's my right Mouse button click but we'll just show you from here and I use this in the games room basically it's a easy way to get your Amiga up and running without really getting into workbench first and uh it's just a cool way of loading games quickly um so this is basically a front end I guess for whd load and um gives you the ability to quickly load up your games so it's very very handy without actually having to load load into workbench uh you have to set it all up of course and provide the paths of where all your games live but um very very cool stuff and I think uh the guy that actually wrote this his name is Tony Gibbs or Gibbs I believe and um so yeah credit to him it's a really really awesome launcher I use it all the time especially in the games room where I don't really want to mess around with using a mouse to run around or to navigate to the uh games folder um and and run what I want I just basically use this so can use you can use the keyboard to navigate or a joystick and uh it's just uh very very handy to do that yeah there guys that's uh that's the A600 up close and personal thanks very much and uh we will catch you again in another video bye for now

Channel: Modern Vintage Gamer

Views: 44,249

Keywords: Amiga 600 (Computer), Amiga (Video Game Platform), Commodore International (Defunct Organization)

Id: 2G7Tjmwm2h8

Length: 16min 32sec (992 seconds)

Published: Sun Jun 28 2015