A600 Upgrade Options

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(Memory)
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*2MB Chip Ram (1MB on Motherboard + 1MB A601 trapdoor expansion)
*2MB Chip Ram (1MB on Motherboard + 1MB A601 trapdoor expansion)
*4MB Fast Ram (PCMCIA SRAM card)
*4MB Fast Ram (PCMCIA SRAM card)
 +
*8MB Fast Ram (Using a custom Fast Ram board)
*32MB Fast Ram if using a CPU accelerator card
*32MB Fast Ram if using a CPU accelerator card

Revision as of 10:08, 5 March 2009

Commodore Amiga A600
Commodore Amiga A600

Contents

A600

The A600 is probably the least expandable Amiga model of them all. Its small and compact size has the advantage of taking up less room than any other model, while retaining the same features and capacities of the older A500+ model. There are however still quite a few upgraded that can be added to the A600 to expand it.

Kickstart

As standard the A600 came with Kickstart version 2.05. This allows Workbench versions up to 2.1 to be used. There were three different versions of the A600 Kickstart 2.05 rom released during the lifetime of the A600 and the earlier revisions contain some restrictions that are important to consider.

A600 Kickstart 2.05 revisions and limitations

  • Kickstart 2.05 revision 37.299 - This early 2.05 kickstart rom included in the earliest A600's doesn't contain any support for the PCMICA slot or the IDE Harddrive port. So if you have an A600 with this revision you cannot use an internal HD or any PCMCIA slot upgrades. This version of the kickstart rom was only included in the very first A600's produced. This version was present in the A300 prototype that Commodore created before relase of the A600.
  • Kickstart 2.05 revision 37.300 - This 2.05 kickstart rom was included in most of the A600's produced. It has full support for the PCMCIA slot so can be used with PCMCIA upgraded. It was also the first revision with support for the internal IDE HD port. However this revision of the ROM only allows an HD up to 40MB in size which is quite restrictive. If you wish to use a larger HD with the A600 you will need to upgrade to the 37.350 revision of the 2.05 kickstart rom or the later 3.1 kickstart rom. Some people have reported that they can use larger HDD with a 37.300 rom by making the first system partition 40MB, and then any further partitions any size up to 2GB each, but this hasn't worked when we tried it with that rom revision.
  • Kickstart 2.05 revision 37.350 - This 2.05 Kickstart ROM has full PCMCIA and internal IDE HD support and the bugs in the previous revisions has been fixed. With this revision you can use any sized HD and all PCMCIA upgrades.

A600 Kickstart 3.1 upgrade

The A600 can be upgraded to Kickstart 3.1, allowing later versions of Workbench to be installed up to AmigaOS 3.9.

Note that if you wished to upgrade an A600 to Kickstart 3.1 you would need to buy a Kickstart 3.1 ROM specifically for the A500/A2000/A600 model range, and not one for the newer A1200 or A4000 as those will not work in an A600. See Upgrading to Kickstart 3.1 ROMs for more information on how to upgrade to 3.1.

Downgrading an A600's Kickstart version

It is also possible to fit the older Kickstart 1.3 rom from an A500 into the A600, allowing more compatibility with older software and games. However using a 1.3 kickstart ROM would remove support for the PCMCIA port and the IDE HD interface, so it isn't recommended unless you use a rom switcher so you can switch between the older 1.3 rom and a newer rom at boot time for full compatibility.

Memory

The A600 has 1MB of chip ram already present on its motherboard.

Maximum memory the A600 can have installed is:

  • 2MB Chip Ram (1MB on Motherboard + 1MB A601 trapdoor expansion)
  • 4MB Fast Ram (PCMCIA SRAM card)
  • 8MB Fast Ram (Using a custom Fast Ram board)
  • 32MB Fast Ram if using a CPU accelerator card

Expansion Ports

  • Trapdoor Memory expansion slot
The trapdoor slot is designed specifically for the Commodore A601 1MB Chip ram expansion card. This upgrades the A600 to 2MB of chip ram which is very useful for productivity software. However most games will not require this much ram unless installed to HD.
Third party hardware developers also created similar 1MB trap door cards to the official A601 and they should all work in the same way when installed. These include the 3-State A602, MicroniK 1MB, Individual Computers A600 2M ChipRAM, and the Alfa Data AlfaRam RA6-1M.
  • Internal 2.5" IDE Port
This port is designed for a laptop style 2.5" Harddrive. To use this port the A600 must have a kickstart 2.05 rom version 37.350 or a kickstart 3.1 rom fitted. The earlier A600 kickstart 2.05 roms contain bugs that restrict the size of HD allowed, or prevent HDs from being used at all. See the Kickstart section above for more details.
It is also possible to utilise the A600's IDE port beyond just using it for a harddrive.
  • IDE Compact Flash Card Adapter - You could use one of these instead of a HD as a sold state HD. Also making it easy to take the CF card out of the A600 and access its contents from your PC using WinUAE.
  • Buffered IDE interface - Fit one of these to the A600's internal IDE port and use it with the IDEFix'97 software. You can then connect more than one device to the IDE port at the same time.
  • Atapi/IDE CD-Rom or Laptop CD drive - The A600's case can easily be customised to fit a laptop style slim CD-Rom drive inside the case. Use a laptop CD-Rom drive alongside a buffered IDE interface and HD to really give the capacities of the A600 a boost, by instantly giving it the additions of an HD and a CD-Rom drive.
  • PCMCIA slot
The 16-bit Type II PCMCIA card slot on the left-hand side of the A600 can be used for a selection of upgrades for the A600. Newer 32-bit CardBus or PC Cards are however incompatible. Available expansions for the A600's PCMCIA card slot include:
  • 1-4MB PCMCIA SRAM Card - This will give the A600 1-4MB of Fast ram. Combine this with the 1MB trapdoor expansion and you can expand the A600 up to a total of 6MB ram (2MB Chip + 4MB Fast ram).
  • CD-Rom Controller (Archos CD-Rom drive)
  • External Harddrive (Archos External HD)
  • SCSI Controller (Squirrel SCSI card)
  • Sound Sampler
  • Video Digitiser
  • Network Card (both wired and wireless)
  • Dial up Modems
  • Compact Flash memory card adapters
Many of these devices were not originally released specifically for the A600, but were PC laptop devices which have since been made to work with the A600 using free third party drives available on Aminet. This means that many of them are now easily available at low prices these days.
  • Clock port expansions
As standard the A600 doesn't have an internal clock port. However there are a couple of third party hardware upgrades that can add one to the A600.
  • Individual Computers A602 (A600 2M ChipRAM) trapdoor ram expansion. This is a standard 1MB chip ram card that fits into the A600's trapdoor expansion slot. It also includes a built in A1200 compatible clock port.
  • Individual Computers A600 Interface Expander. This card connects to the A600's Gayle custom chip on the motherboard and provides an A1200 compatible clock port connector for the A600. This card was also designed to fit inside the A600 together with the same companies accelerator card for the A600.
Adding a clock port to the A600 allows it to then take advantage of the clock port expansion cards released for the A1200 to add things like the Subway USB card to add USB ports to the A600, The Delfina DSP soundcard, or the Silversurfer for networking.

Custom upgrades

In addition to the upgrades possible with the A600 using the built in expansion ports, some third party developers also created upgraded that connected directly to the A600's motherboard, allowing upgrades beyond the original design of the A600.

  • Accelerators
As standard CPU accelerators are not possible to add to an A600 because it is one of the only models of Amiga that doesn't provide an expansion port capable of accessing the main Amiga hardware to connect additional processors. However by fitting a piggy back connector over the A600's original motherboard mounted 68000 processor hardware developers managed to provide accelerators for the A600. These include the following:
  • Apollo 620 - A 68020 accelerator running at 20MHz or 25MHz with a FPU at the same speed as the CPU. And support for up to 8MB Fast ram. This accelerator is not PCMCIA friendly so needs to have a jumper set to 4MB to limit the fast ram of PCMCIA cards are going to be used.
  • Apollo 630 - A 68030 accelerator running at 40MHz or 50MHz with an optional FPU at the same speed. And support for up to 32MB of fast ram. This accelerator is PCMCIA friendly so should work with PCMCIA cards. This accelerator might however have problems working with revision 1.3 A600 motherboards.
  • DCE Viper 630 - A 68030 accelerator running at 33MHz, 40MHz or 42MHz with an FPU running at the same speed. And support for 4 or 8MB of fast ram. This accelerator is PCMCIA friendly.

Other upgrades

Also usable on the A600 is any Amiga hardware that can be connected via the RBG Video, Joystick, Floppy drive, Parallel or serial ports of the Amiga as the A600 shares exactly the same ports as all other models of Amiga. These ports were often used to connect external floppy disk drives, sound samplers, video digitisers, scanners, midi devices, printers... etc.

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