Commodore Amiga 600

Overview

Below you can see a photo of an Amiga 600 with some accessories. The power supply can be seen at the top, the mouse bottom right, and the floppy disk (Workbench, Extras and Fonts) rest on the computer.

As was with the Amiga 500, the '600 featured a keyboard built into the unit but as the overall size was much smaller the Amiga 600 did not have the numeric keypad. There are three status LED's to the right of the keyboard to indicate power is on, floppy access and hard disk access. Oddly, there are two blank keys, one at the left of the keyboard and the other to the right; the left blank key does produce a character.

At the left side of the Amiga 600 is a PCMCIA type II slot for expansion and to the right of the unit is the floppy disk slot; floppy disks were the main form of storage unless you had a hard drive. At the back of the computer is the power connector, the RF and colour composite video connectors (the Amiga 500 required an adapter to get these video outputs), the RGB port to connect to a monitor (or a TV using a SCART cable), there are also serial and parallel ports and a floppy disk connector for an external floppy disk drive. Unfortunately, the Amiga 600 cannot be connected to a TV with VGA input using a simple cable; you must use a 'scan doubler'. However, you can use a SCART cable especially designed for the Amiga which will give you a clearer picture than composite.

At the bottom of the computer is a 'trapdoor' for adding an expansion card (such as to add more RAM). Because the Amiga 600 did not have the additional expansion connector that the Amiga 500 had, the A600 could not be expanded as much as its predecessor,

As mentioned, the Amiga 600 has support for a hard drive which is limited to 4GB and needs to be a 2.5 inch (laptop) IDE drive (or you can use a compact flash adapter). On the Amiga 600's mother board is a 44-pin connector to which you can attach the hard drive by a suitable cable. Note that the 44-pin connector carries data and power as was typical of laptop hard drives so it's possible that you can use a laptop hard drive and cable with the Amiga 600-just make sure you connect it up right. Once the hard drive is connected you will need to format it which can be done using a version of the Workbench software designed for hard drives. Some Amiga 600's, however, shipped with a Kickstart version that didn't support hard drives or did but limited the maximum size that could be used. The A600 should have at least Kickstart 37.350 which fully supported hard drives up to 4GB.

A downside of not having a hard drive connected is that the computer will be much slower to start up as it looks for a hard drive. I feel this is a serious design flaw as I actually thought the computer was not working as it was taking a long time to reach the 'insert floppy' screen. If you connect a hard drive even one that isn't formatted the computer will at least start up quicker.

The standard software to come with the Amiga 600 is the Workbench, Extras and Fonts disks. Once the computer starts up you can insert the Workbench floppy and the Amiga will boot into the 'Workbench' which is the GUI. The Workbench version is 2.0, which looks more bland than the earlier Workbench that was available for the Amiga 500.

Let's now look at the Workbench, the Amiga O/S, as booted from the Workbench floppy disk:

In the screenshot above the Workbench disk has fully loaded and I have opened a number of windows. At the top-left you can see the Ram disk and Workbench icons; when double left clicked their contents will be opened in a window. The Ram disk is a virtual floppy disk which is useful for placing files copied from a floppy so that rather than keep loading from disk the file will be accessed from RAM which of course is a lot faster. It is also possible to have a recoverable Ram disk in which its contents survive a reboot.

The top-middle window shows the contents of the Workbench disk while the Utilities windows shows what's in the Utilities folder. Note that only files that have an icon are displayed in the windows. The bottom window is the Shell, an improved version of the Amiga's Command Line Interface. In the screenshot the shell is displaying the directory of the Workbench disk.

While mouse left click is used for selections, mouse right click must be pressed and held to access menu options which appear at the top of the screen. A window's left button closes it and the far right button brings the window to the front or moves it behind other windows; clicking a window doesn't automatically bring it to the front. The second button from the right changes the window to one of two different sizes.

A problem with relying on floppy disks is that they are known to be develop problems, such as corruption, and of course you can make backups using other floppies but that is not an ideal solution. Fortunately, a lot of Amiga software is available to download from online sites in adf (Amiga Disk File format) but without special hardware a PC cannot read or write Amiga formatted floppy disks. You can, however, connect an Amiga 600 (or other Amiga) to a PC using a so-called null modem cable provided your non-Amiga computer has an old style serial 'COM' port (an USB to serial adapter may also work). Then it is a matter of downloading and installing Amiga explorer on your PC, typing some commands on your Amiga (you must have a working Workbench disk), and you will have a means to transfer files from your PC to your Amiga. These files can be copied over to the Amiga's RAM disk or even written straight to a floppy disk inserted into the Amiga (if you are copying an adf file to floppy it will automatically extract the files to disk). You can download Amiga explorer from:

http://www.amigaforever.com/ae/

My discovery of Amiga explorer came about not just because of the need of backing up files in a more reliable way but also due to the need for the install disk to set-up a hard drive I had connected to my A600. As soon as I had transferred the install disk to an actual floppy using Amiga explorer I was able to run HDToolBox from the HDTools drawer to set up the hard drive which in doing so created an 8MB partition on the hard drive. To this partition, I used Install 2.1 to add the contents of the Workbench 2.1 disc and would have also added the Extras disc if I had it (you can cancel when it asks for the Extras disc). Now I had a bootable hard drive with Workbench 2.1 on it but somewhat annoyingly an inserted flopping will take precedence over the hard drive. You can hold both mouse buttons when the Amiga is powered on to get to the option to choose the boot device.

As the Workbench partition was only 8MB it left almost 4GB in the other partition but whenever I tried to format the partition I was faced with a 'N

ot a validated dos disk' error. By using HDToolBox I was able to create additional partitions, each 1GB, which I formatted in Workbench but yet again one partition I was unable to format. I could have used the slower format option but that took so long to make a small amount of progression that I aborted it.

Using a compact flash card with the Amiga 600 was a little different even though it uses the same IDE interface as a hard drive. Firstly, you need an adapter to convert the compact flash connector to the correct connector for the Amiga. You can buy these compact flash to IDE adapters cheaply but be aware that they come in different forms. You need one that takes the power from the Amiga's internal IDE connector rather than from a PC power supply type connector.

I found that my Amiga didn't detect my compact flash card even though it detected a hard drive that was not Amiga formatted. So, in Workbench I used HDToolBox to set up the compact flash and this involves setting up a new drive type (the program sees it as an unknown type which is possibly because compact flash is a type of removable media). If you then try to read the compact flash configuration it complains and reports that the size is in the minus! However, it does read the other information correctly and reports the correct capacity when creating partitions. However, I still got the same problem as with the hard drive: one partition couldn't be formatted.

I did set up a compact flash card on my Amiga 1200 and did a full format on the first partition but a quick format on the remaining partitions. By doing this I could format all partitions with no problems which leads me to believe that the previous problems I was having were down to not doing a full format on the first partition. Also, it is important to remember to restart the Amiga after creating the partitions and before formatting them.

The advantages that a compact flash card has over a hard drive is that it is a lot smaller, makes no noise, draws less power and yet is still very fast. A concern I had with using even a 2.5 inch hard drive was the amount of heat it was giving off considering how near it was to the Amiga's chips, as there is no fan. A disadvantage of a compact flash card is that it may not last last as long as a hard drive so be sure to make back ups to floppy or to another computer.

You can watch a video I did about the Amiga 600 at:

https://youtu.be/2fYfD3Et2sU

All content of this and related pages is copyright (c) James S. 2015-2021