--- title: Commodore Amiga 600 categories: - Computers types: - Home Computer origins: - U.S.A. years: - '1992' cpus: - Motorola MC68000 params: name: Amiga 600 image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_system_s1.jpg company: /companies/commodore company_name: Commodore specs: - label: NAME value: Amiga 600 - label: MANUFACTURER value: Commodore - label: TYPE value: Home Computer - label: ORIGIN value: U.S.A. - label: YEAR value: March 1992 - label: END OF PRODUCTION value: '1993' - label: KEYBOARD value: Built-in keyboard, 78 keys - label: CPU value: Motorola MC68000 - label: SPEED value: |- 7.09379 MHz (PAL)\ 7.15909 MHz (NTSC) - label: CO-PROCESSOR value: 'ECS based chipset: 8375 Fat Agnus (memory controller and blitter), 8373 ECS Denise (video control chip), 8364R7 Paula (sound & I/O), Gayle (I/O, IDE interface)' - label: RAM value: 1 MB Chip RAM, expandable to 6 MB max (2 MB Chip RAM + 4 MB Fast RAM) - label: ROM value: 'Kickstart 2.05: 512 KB' - label: GRAPHIC MODES value: 320x256, 320x512, 640x256, 640x480, 640x512, 1280x200, 1280x256 - label: COLORS value: |- Palette: 4096\ On screen: 4 in 1280 modes, 16 in 640 modes, 32 in 320 modes, 64 in EHB, 4096 in HAM - label: SOUND value: 4 channel 8 bit PCM, stereo output - label: SIZE / WEIGHT value: 14'' deep x 9.5'' wide x 3'' high / 6 lbs - label: I/O PORTS value: RS-232 serial port, Centronics parallel port, external disk interface, 2x RCA audio, PCMCIA/JEIDA card interface, IDE hard drive interface, composite video out, RF out, 2x Atari joystick/mouse ports - label: BUILT IN MEDIA value: 3.5'' floppy disk drive - label: OS value: Workbench 2.05 - label: POWER SUPPLY value: External PSU - label: PRICE value: £399 (U.K. 1992) tabs: - photos - hardware - emulators - links - videos photos: - title: AMIGA 600 subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_front_1.jpg - title: A600 subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_system_s2.jpg - title: WITH PSU & MOUSE subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_system_s3.jpg - title: RUNNING WORKBENCH 2.0 subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_running_s1.jpg - title: LEFT & RIGHT SIDES subtitle: '' text: |- On the right hand side: floppy disk drive, mouse and joystick DB9 connectors.\ On the left hand side: PCMCIA card slot. image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_sides_s1.jpg - title: REAR CONNECTORS subtitle: '' text: |- From left to right:\ • External FDD DB23 connector\ • Serial DB25 port\ • Parallel DB25 port\ • Left & right audio jacks\ • Video DB23 connector\ • Composite video jack\ • RF modulator jack, channel selector and adjustment\ • Power plug. image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_rearconn_s1.jpg - title: OPENED subtitle: '' text: |- The motherboard is protected against magnetic fields by a metallic cover.\ Note the empty RAM expansion location and the support for an optional 2.5" hard disk drive. image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_opened_s1.jpg - title: MOTHERBOARD subtitle: '' text: |- **(1)** Gayle Chip, controls the IDE HDD connector\ **(2)** Kickstart V2.05, holds all the I/O routines, may be compared with the PC's BIOS ROM\ **(3)** Motorola MC-68000 processor\ **(4)** PCMCIA connector\ **(5)** Fat Agnus chip. Among other things, controls the memory addressing (up to 6 MB), the system clock, DMA channels and parts of the display graphics\ **(6)** Super Denise chip, in charge of most of the graphics related tasks\ **(7)** IDE HDD connector\ **(8)** TV/RF modulator\ **(9)** Keyboard connector\ **(10)** Zorro interface connector, intended for RAM extension cards\ **(11)** 1st CIA chip, Manages serial communications between the main unit and peripherals. A 2nd CIA chip is located next to the FDD connector\ **(12)** Paula chip, provides the 4-channel audio sound, also controls the FDD interface\ **(13)** 1 MB RAM chips\ **(14)** Internal FDD connector. image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_mainboard_s1.jpg - title: USER'S MANUALS subtitle: '' text: '' image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_manuals_s1.jpg - title: LAPTOP PROTOTYPE subtitle: '' text: |- One of the numerous attempts in designing a portable version of the Amiga system. Same design was applied to the Amiga 1200 version. Thanks to **Moshe Elmashali** image: /media/museum/photos/commodore_amiga600_proto_1.jpg hardware: - title: MIDI GOLD 500 subtitle: by Golden Hawk Technology text: |- This is a MIDI interface for the Amiga 500, 2000, or 3000... It features :\ \- one MIDI In\ \- two MIDI Out\ \- one switchable Out/Thru\ \- one MIDI/Serial Switch\ \- one Out/Thru Switch image: /media/museum/hardware/commodore_amiga_golden-hawk-midi-interface.jpg - title: AMIGA 1300 subtitle: Genlock text: '' image: /media/museum/hardware/commodore_amiga1000_1300-genlock.jpg - title: MEMORY EXPANSION BOARD subtitle: '' text: 2 / 4 / 6 / 8 MB expansion card here fitted with 2 MB. image: /media/museum/hardware/commodore_amiga1500_memboard_1.jpg - title: VIDEO BOARD subtitle: '' text: This board featured 2 MB of RAM and allowed the Amiga to be connected to a standard VGA monitor. All the video modes could be displayed, including the interlace one. image: /media/museum/hardware/commodore_amiga1500_videoboard_1.jpg - title: A570 CD-ROM subtitle: '' text: Thanks to David Griffith for this picture image: /media/museum/hardware/amiga_cdrom_a570_1.jpg - title: HARD DISK CARD subtitle: '' text: |- 40 MB SCSI card from SUPRA CORP. Additional SCSI devices could be connected in chain trough the back connector image: /media/museum/hardware/commodore_amiga1500_hdboard_1.jpg emulators: - title: Amiga Forever url: http://www.amigaforever.com/ platform: Windows text: Complete but commercial Amiga emulator - title: AMIthlon & AmigaXL url: http://amigaosxl.haage-partner.de/index-e.html platform: Windows text: Powerful commercial emulators - title: WinFellow url: HTTP://FELLOW.SOURCEFORGE.NET platform: Windows text: Probably better at some games than UAE, but not as versatile. - title: WinUAE url: http://www.winuae.net/ platform: Windows text: The best Amiga emulator ? :-) - title: Max UAE url: http://maxuae.de/ platform: Apple text: UAE for Mac OS X - title: AmigaSYS url: http://amigasys.fw.hu/ platform: Unix / Linux text: AmigaSYS is a pre-installed full Amiga OS for WinUAE - title: Pocket UAE url: http://pocketinsanity.sourceforge.net/ platform: Other platform text: Amiga Emulator for Pocket PC - title: Experimental UAE url: http://www.rcdrummond.net/uae/ platform: Multiplatform text: Standard UAE enhanced with features from WinUAE. - title: MESS url: http://www.mess.org platform: Multiplatform text: MESS now emulates the Commodore Amiga - title: UAE url: http://www.freiburg.linux.de/~uae/ platform: Multiplatform text: '(Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) for BeOS, Mac OS, Linux, NextStep, MSDOS, OS/2 and Win95/NT : Homepage.' links: - title: Amiga animations url: http://www.randelshofer.ch/animations/ text: A collection of Amiga Animations. This is the only site where you can see them online! - title: Amiga Interactive Guide url: http://amiga.emugaming.com/ text: Excellent site ! A lot of very interesting infos there. - title: Amiga Island url: http://www.virtualpast.de/ text: Excellent site with ROMs to download! - title: Amiga Web Directory url: http://www.cucug.org/amiga.html text: '' - title: AMIGART.COM url: http://www.amigart.com text: Nice site with Amiga news - title: Back to the Roots url: HTTP://WWW.BACK2ROOTS.ORG/ text: Amiga culture, guides, huge collection of legally downloadable software, and much more. - title: Lex Site - Amiga Hardware Database url: http://amiga.multigraph.com/ text: The website title says it all! - title: NetBSD-Amiga url: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/amiga/index.html text: '' - title: Old Computer Mags url: http://www.old-computer-mags.com/ text: Scans of old computer and videogames magazine - title: Recorded Amiga Games url: http://www.recordedamigagames.org text: Speedrun, longplay and misc videos of Amiga games and more. - title: RetroPack url: http://www.retropack.co.uk/ text: Website dedicated to selling original Amigas, CD32s and Amiga/CD32 Games. - title: The Amiga Monitor url: http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/MikeWebb/amhome.html text: '' - title: The Big Book of Amiga Hardware url: http://www.amiga-hardware.com/ text: Pics & info (pinouts, jumpers etc.) for just about every piece of Amiga related hardware there is - title: The English Amiga Board url: http://eab.abime.net/ text: Community site for Amiga fans - title: World-Wide Amiga - Online!! url: http://www.amiga.org/ text: '' - title: Web Wiz CAPTCHA url: http://www.webwizcaptcha.com text: Reviews of Amiga software, hardware videos: - title: Commodore Amiga commercial - EXIT url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8721405286052618769&hl=fr text: 'Length: 41 s' - title: Commodore Amiga 500 commercial url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5737538578208665725&hl=fr text: 'Length: 29 s' - title: Commodore Amiga 1000 commercial url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=5356507595228759374&hl=fr text: 'Length: 32 s' - title: Commodore Amiga 600 italian commercial url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=-768109352967297990&hl=fr text: 'Length: 19 s' - title: Commodore Amiga packs commercial url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fdaMq8JLyHA text: 'Length: 21 s' - title: Commodore Amiga TV Ad - Celebrities url: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iEFoj6sbDjU text: 'Length: 29 s' - title: Commodore Amiga 500 promotional video url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=9038863557655975739&hl=fr text: 'Length: 15 min 06 s' - title: 'Computer Chronicles: Amiga & Atari (1985)' url: http://video.google.com/googleplayer.swf?docId=8978343825632445107&hl=fr text: 'Length: 29 min 18 s' comments: - author: michael nurney (uk) date: Saturday 22nd July 2017 text: The Amiga laptop comment is incorrect, there was no amiga laptop after the 8 bit laptop was canned, none was ever considered. The A600 was the bastard son of the cancelled A300 that Commodore Uk requested and agreed on. The German commodore group however insisted on a hard drive and thus a big increase in cost. When the 600 was finally ready - none of Commodores divisions ordered it - no one wanted it. It was supposed to be a cheaper A500 (A300) and upgradable with plug in hard drive, ram etc up to the A500 spec - author: Fredrik date: Thursday 5th August 2010 text: The Amiga 600 is famous for being the most hated of all Amiga''s! Commodore really screw up things with this model and made a lot of confusions. It was more expensive and had same performance as the Amiga 500!?! What is the point?? However, today you can get them much cheaper than an A1200 and upgrade it with 2Mb memory and a compact flash disk of 2Gb which makes it a great little gaming machine. Back in 1992 however it was a disaster! - author: Darren Holt (Australia) date: Monday 25th May 2009 text: |- Originally the Amiga 600''s mainboard was disigned and developed to be Commodores first attempt at a "Laptop Computer"!\ (Hence, the reason behind the lac of "Numeric Keypad" and the built in "PCIMA slot") Poor sales of the 500+ put pressure on Commodore to release it''s successor, all that was available at the time was the prototype "laptop mainboards"!\ Sadly the "Laptop Amiga" was canned, and the "600" was born!\ Oh, what could have been!? - author: JOE HARDISTY (STALYBRIDGE) date: Friday 20th January 2006 text: THE AMIGA 600 WAS EXELLENT I KNOW EVERYONTE "SAYS" IT BUT YES THE PROGRAM SAY IS FANTASTIC WHEN I WAS ABOUT 5 I HAD LOADS OF FUN ON SAY. PLEASE FEEL FREE TO E-MAIL ME AT ANTHONYH055@HOTMAIL.COM P.S. DOES ANYONE KNOW IF I CAN USE A HP LASERJER 4 PLUS ON IT? - author: eRin (New Zealand) date: Sunday 6th November 2005 text: |- I think it was about '94. You can get the internet if you have an external modem, and an internet browser. i would suggest just using pc/mac for the internet, because you will scream at how long it would take to load pages, Amigas are really awesome but for basic apps, I use mine for music composition and well, games. I bought the A500 as gaming console, but the fact it came with the 501 memory ext and hdd meant I even had an OS loaded and I got a PC emulator as well. what I haven't figured out yet, or havent tried, is getting the emulator in and plugging in some DOS games. - author: Michael Tesh (sheffield) date: Wednesday 25th May 2005 text: The A-600 is a great computer, i think the program speech synthesizer on workbench called SAY is quite advanced for how old the machine is it is quite realistic. - author: Ekkehard Morgenstern (Germany) date: Tuesday 17th May 2005 text: |- I still have my A-600 (I had an A-3000 and have an A-1000 and A-1200 also). The A-600 was a great little portable computer, which wasn't quite like the Amiga notebook or laptop that was never manufactured (thanks to C='s licensing policy), but it was useful noneless, you could just throw the A-600, the power supply and some cables into a bag and plug it into a monitor elsewhere. The great thing about both A-600 and A-1200 is the built-in IDE interface which allows for 2.5" notebook drives to be connected. The bad thing about the A-600 is its little built-in memory of 1 MB, the lack of a battery-backed up clock (which could be added with some plug-in board), and the slow 7.16 MHz 68000 CPU (which also could be replaced with plug-in boards). However, for older or smaller Amiga applications, the A-600 was quite suitable, and it was possible to use applications that were bypassing the operating system (like many games). A true novelty for that time was the PCMCIA slot (that the A-1200 also has), which was used for some expansion cards or interfaces. My A-600 is still in working order; so despite its cheap casing, it was durable nonetheless. The A-3000 and A-1000 models had internal shielding which also kept the dust away -- not one grain of dust in those. - author: Matt (Earth) date: Tuesday 21st December 2004 text: Commodore went broke in 1994 I belive. Gateway bought them. - author: Anonymous (USA) date: Saturday 16th October 2004 text: |- I had one of these machines back in the 90's, being so small it was ideal for a cramped teenagers bedroom. However I regretted it about a week after buying it. The disk drive was awful! It made a horiffic grinding noise whenever it read or write, and the whole case had a very flimsy quality to it. By the time it was released it was already a bit behind the times, and struggled a lot with "serious" applications. You could buy a CPU accelerator board that took the speed up a bit, but as the case was so awkward inside it had to held in place to a wodge of folded cardboard. The PC card memory expansions were hard to find. - author: Glyn Cowan (Glasgow) date: Friday 7th March 2003 text: help can anyone give me a copy of the 4 discs that were supplied with the amiga 600 you know the ones withe the fonts and the printer set up stuff and that grovey speech program if so contact me at glyncowan@hotmail.com - author: steve (Devon, England) date: Tuesday 17th December 2002 text: I have an Amiga 600 and it is good - I have Sensible World of Soccer 95/96, and i need some help with it. When did commodore/amiga go broke? and can i get the internet on my amiga? related: - /museum/commodore-amiga-1000 - /museum/commodore-amiga-1200 - /museum/commodore-amiga-1500 - /museum/commodore-amiga-2000 - /museum/commodore-amiga-2500 - /museum/commodore-amiga-3000 - /museum/commodore-amiga-4000 - /museum/commodore-amiga-500 - /museum/commodore-amiga-500-plus - /museum/commodore-amiga-600hd - /museum/commodore-cdtv oc_id: 64 source: url: https://web.archive.org/web/20230528101640/http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?c=64 date: '2023-05-28' --- After being on sale for only a few months the [Amiga 500 Plus](/museum/commodore-amiga-500-plus/) was replaced with the Amiga 600 in March 1992. The smallest Amiga ever made, it is similar in size to a laptop and weighs just 6 lbs. Originally the A600 was to be sold alongside the A500+ as a budget model to be named the Amiga 300, but instead replaced the A500+ which required a name change. Very early models of the A600 have A300 printed on their motherboards, an indication of the confusion that was taking hold at Commodore after the surprise launch of the A500+. These early models also have a slightly different version of AmigaOS (although it is still version 2.05, it has the internal revision number 37.299) which doesn't have built-in support for the IDE or PCMCIA interfaces, the drivers for which must be loaded from a floppy disk. Later revisions of the AmigaOS (versions 37.300 & 37.350) have these drivers built-in. The small size of the A600 also added to the incompatibility problems of the A500+. The numeric keypad had been removed from the A600 and this added hardware incompatibility to the already existing AmigaOS incompatibilities. Problems occurred with software that used the numeric keypad for inputs, mostly flight sims but also things like spreadsheets or office software, although a numeric keypad emulator was later released to address this problem. As usual with the Amiga there were a number of official and unofficial bundles were available, with prices starting at £399. Also released was the [Amiga 600HD](/museum/commodore-amiga-600hd/) which included a built-in hard drive. But with the release of the powerful new [Amiga 1200](/museum/commodore-amiga-1200/) later the same year, and at the same price as the A600, a great opportunity was missed. By this time sales of the Amiga's great rival the Atari ST were slowing considerably and instead of marketing the A600 as a budget machine (as it should have been originally), it was effectively pushed out of the market thanks to competition from Commodore themselves. --- Interesting information from **Malcolm Ramage**:\ The A600 was originally going to be sold as the Amiga A300, a low level Amiga to be sold below the A500/A500+. The Commodore directors were showing even more signs of dissarray than normal by this time, and the A500+ was cancelled and replaced by the A600, a re-badged A300. No cheaper and no different from the A500/A500+, except from the case, the HD option and the lack of numeric keypad (Which played havoc with flight simulators that relied on the keypad for dedicated functions). Many of the first A600s sold had the model number A300 on the motherboards, showing the haste with which the last 'classic' Amiga was brought to the market. These models had no IDE interface on the motherboard, this had to be added via an expansion option, though they are few in number and rare to find.