Hello everyone,
I thought I would share my A600 story and prove that I do actually own an Amiga - today after two years of accumulating parts and organising repairs my Amiga is again in one piece and built
I would say around 1991/2 my friend showed me his newly acquired A500+ Cartoon Classics model; I was very impressed although still very loyal to my Spectrum scene. By 92 the Spectrum scene was in steep decline, time had finally caught the venerable 8 bit computer up I realised. I wasn't taken by the A500 at the time, although I massively respected it, but then came along the A600. I first spotted it in the Amiga related advertisements within my Your Sinclair magazine and other advertisements within newspapers while on my paper round around 91/92 maybe. I fell in love with its small form factor and aesthetics immediately.
The A600 bundle for me was the computer with the hard drive bundled in , from memory the hard drive might have been 20mb or 40mb? Age 13/14? I badly wanted a hard drive! This was the machine I wanted but to make it affordable (I always remember Amigas up to 1991 being darn expensive) the only way to me at least was to order it through a mail order club Scala? or something similar - I wasn't a member so approached a 'friend' who was adamant I needed to buy the brand new just out A1200 that was similar money but without a hard drive. Technically he had a point, a point I could not really argue against so I went for the A1200 without a hard drive. But if I'm honest I never really fell in love with it and after being disappointed by a lack of AGA only titles on release so sold it to my best friend maybe 6 month later on the lure of a PC with a hard disk(! this is what I was most interested in!!) and 3d games.. Turns out the 'friend' who wanted or actually practically forced me to buy the A1200 after speaking with my parents was actually just after the AGA bundled in games that he robbed out of the box before I had it...!
...roll on to 1996/7 (I'm 17/18), by this point I'm a PC man through and through, but then while digging around a second hand bargain shop I spot a little A600 on the shelf for £30 which looks brand new. I cannot resist buying it! My two favourite aspects of Amiga computing was/is the demo scene and the ingenuous upgrades so promptly brought a 030@40mhz with 8mb of ram from Power Computing, all my favourite software like Octamed and Paint on CDs, and all the cables to fit an IDE hard disk internally. I got quite a long way with it but my Amiga wouldn't boot from the hard disk (rom version was too early for my one gig disk I know now........). Back then (like now actually
) I had limited knowledge on the Amiga so I took it to an 'Amiga specialist' in London while there to see U2 Pop Mart (August 1997), only to get ripped off with an Amiga that still did not work and £60 lighter on the pocket, oh and no ROM chip! At this point the sensible 'adult' part of my brain stepped in and said 'enough is enough' and called time on the project where it sat on a shelf thereafter for years.... How it was left circa 97t:-
Notice how white the case is! It doesn't feel like a long time ago, but I guess it was...!
...roll on 2005 - I've moved out and I am very skint so need to sell anything I don't need to raise cash rapidly to avoid getting kicked out of my rented accommodation, this included the 030 from Power Computing much to my regret
oh:
...roll on 2010 - I stumble across Amibay and get the burning desire to rebuild my Amiga - but don't have my accelerator Out of desperation (I couldn't find a Viper anywhere..) I send an email to Jens at Individual asking him if he is ever going to release an accelerator for the A600 seeing the products he is selling. To my genuine amazement he says, yes! So begins my new adventure with my A600 where the new moto is 'enough is never enough' . I feel I have genuinely built my dream Amiga (more than my dream actually) - and I feel very lucky and priviledged to have been able to do this with new parts - how can this be possible 20 years after it was released?!?! And 20 years after I finished pushing news papers through peoples doors?!:wooha:
The hardest part was deciding to cut the floppy drive plastic facing in order to fit a customised plate for VGA, UBS and Delfina sound output. No word of a lie, I sat with the case in my left hand and my Stanley knife in the right for about an hour weighing up whether it was the right thing to do or not.. My machine will never be perfect museum piece, it is heavily hacked as Merlin will confirm from 97, but it means an awful lot to me sentimentally and being honest after hacking it about massively fitting a slim line 3.5 inch IDE drive as a teenager I didn't want to cause it any more pain! In the end I decided to go for it in the spirit of that original adventure in 1997!
Please see below for the finished article - I might repaint the plate I made as I am not happy with the colour match. Quick tip, ignore the Halford colour match labels on the spray cans they are miles out!!!!! grrrrrrr I have also ordered a micro drive to replace the SSD - I have been accumulating parts for 2 years so it is incredible what things have arrive on the market and what trends have changed - for example I have a new redundant A603 now!!:shhh:
I can post more on the build if people wish to see them.
I took inspiration from the original Star Trek film when they discovered this all powerful being, hungry for knowledge called V'Ger - turns out it was simply the sate-light Voyager from the 1970s just with load and load of extra technology added too it turning it into something well beyond what it was originally intended to be!!!! I created my A600 entering into the spirit of that idea
Thanks must go to:-
- Jens - for making the impossible possible in the modern era
- Merlin - for making my A600 case and keyboard look brand new, oh and fixing the keyboard mount!
- Pscube - for help understanding the phono socket outputs in relation to my plan. And inspiration looking at his projects
- Amigakit - for help and advice, and supplying all the parts - although remove your blooming accumulative totaller!!!
- Milfos - plenty of inspiration viewing his projects
- Dale - advice and inspiration viewing his A600 project and the pointer to EAB for the custom APower heavy duty power supply.
- Amibay - for providing such a positive interesting forum to discuss anything actually
- They'll be many more I just cannot remember them all.... - thank you all 
I really hope this isn't the end of the story - they say you are better off not meeting your heroes - I am not sure if the same is true of your computing heroes, the Amiga after market hardware scene certainly being one of them
.....................................................one last thing, can someone with a Delfina check my clock port connection to help me understand if it is connected correctly. Too scared to turn it on at the moment for fear of cooking it...
Also my Subway UBS connects only have 4 wires per USB rather than 5 - Green and white also appear the wrong way around from the factory....:help: See below including unmodified stock connector:-
I thought I would share my A600 story and prove that I do actually own an Amiga - today after two years of accumulating parts and organising repairs my Amiga is again in one piece and built
I would say around 1991/2 my friend showed me his newly acquired A500+ Cartoon Classics model; I was very impressed although still very loyal to my Spectrum scene. By 92 the Spectrum scene was in steep decline, time had finally caught the venerable 8 bit computer up I realised. I wasn't taken by the A500 at the time, although I massively respected it, but then came along the A600. I first spotted it in the Amiga related advertisements within my Your Sinclair magazine and other advertisements within newspapers while on my paper round around 91/92 maybe. I fell in love with its small form factor and aesthetics immediately.
The A600 bundle for me was the computer with the hard drive bundled in , from memory the hard drive might have been 20mb or 40mb? Age 13/14? I badly wanted a hard drive! This was the machine I wanted but to make it affordable (I always remember Amigas up to 1991 being darn expensive) the only way to me at least was to order it through a mail order club Scala? or something similar - I wasn't a member so approached a 'friend' who was adamant I needed to buy the brand new just out A1200 that was similar money but without a hard drive. Technically he had a point, a point I could not really argue against so I went for the A1200 without a hard drive. But if I'm honest I never really fell in love with it and after being disappointed by a lack of AGA only titles on release so sold it to my best friend maybe 6 month later on the lure of a PC with a hard disk(! this is what I was most interested in!!) and 3d games.. Turns out the 'friend' who wanted or actually practically forced me to buy the A1200 after speaking with my parents was actually just after the AGA bundled in games that he robbed out of the box before I had it...!
...roll on to 1996/7 (I'm 17/18), by this point I'm a PC man through and through, but then while digging around a second hand bargain shop I spot a little A600 on the shelf for £30 which looks brand new. I cannot resist buying it! My two favourite aspects of Amiga computing was/is the demo scene and the ingenuous upgrades so promptly brought a 030@40mhz with 8mb of ram from Power Computing, all my favourite software like Octamed and Paint on CDs, and all the cables to fit an IDE hard disk internally. I got quite a long way with it but my Amiga wouldn't boot from the hard disk (rom version was too early for my one gig disk I know now........). Back then (like now actually
) I had limited knowledge on the Amiga so I took it to an 'Amiga specialist' in London while there to see U2 Pop Mart (August 1997), only to get ripped off with an Amiga that still did not work and £60 lighter on the pocket, oh and no ROM chip! At this point the sensible 'adult' part of my brain stepped in and said 'enough is enough' and called time on the project where it sat on a shelf thereafter for years.... How it was left circa 97t:-
Notice how white the case is! It doesn't feel like a long time ago, but I guess it was...!
...roll on 2005 - I've moved out and I am very skint so need to sell anything I don't need to raise cash rapidly to avoid getting kicked out of my rented accommodation, this included the 030 from Power Computing much to my regret
oh:...roll on 2010 - I stumble across Amibay and get the burning desire to rebuild my Amiga - but don't have my accelerator
Out of desperation (I couldn't find a Viper anywhere..) I send an email to Jens at Individual asking him if he is ever going to release an accelerator for the A600 seeing the products he is selling. To my genuine amazement he says, yes! So begins my new adventure with my A600 where the new moto is 'enough is never enough' . I feel I have genuinely built my dream Amiga (more than my dream actually) - and I feel very lucky and priviledged to have been able to do this with new parts - how can this be possible 20 years after it was released?!?! And 20 years after I finished pushing news papers through peoples doors?!:wooha:The hardest part was deciding to cut the floppy drive plastic facing in order to fit a customised plate for VGA, UBS and Delfina sound output. No word of a lie, I sat with the case in my left hand and my Stanley knife in the right for about an hour weighing up whether it was the right thing to do or not.. My machine will never be perfect museum piece, it is heavily hacked as Merlin will confirm from 97, but it means an awful lot to me sentimentally and being honest after hacking it about massively fitting a slim line 3.5 inch IDE drive as a teenager I didn't want to cause it any more pain! In the end I decided to go for it in the spirit of that original adventure in 1997!
Please see below for the finished article - I might repaint the plate I made as I am not happy with the colour match. Quick tip, ignore the Halford colour match labels on the spray cans they are miles out!!!!! grrrrrrr I have also ordered a micro drive to replace the SSD - I have been accumulating parts for 2 years so it is incredible what things have arrive on the market and what trends have changed - for example I have a new redundant A603 now!!:shhh:
I can post more on the build if people wish to see them.
I took inspiration from the original Star Trek film when they discovered this all powerful being, hungry for knowledge called V'Ger - turns out it was simply the sate-light Voyager from the 1970s just with load and load of extra technology added too it turning it into something well beyond what it was originally intended to be!!!! I created my A600 entering into the spirit of that idea
Thanks must go to:-
- Jens - for making the impossible possible in the modern era
- Merlin - for making my A600 case and keyboard look brand new, oh and fixing the keyboard mount!
- Pscube - for help understanding the phono socket outputs in relation to my plan. And inspiration looking at his projects
- Amigakit - for help and advice, and supplying all the parts - although remove your blooming accumulative totaller!!!
- Milfos - plenty of inspiration viewing his projects
- Dale - advice and inspiration viewing his A600 project and the pointer to EAB for the custom APower heavy duty power supply.
- Amibay - for providing such a positive interesting forum to discuss anything actually
- They'll be many more I just cannot remember them all.... - thank you all
I really hope this isn't the end of the story - they say you are better off not meeting your heroes - I am not sure if the same is true of your computing heroes, the Amiga after market hardware scene certainly being one of them
.....................................................one last thing, can someone with a Delfina check my clock port connection to help me understand if it is connected correctly. Too scared to turn it on at the moment for fear of cooking it...
Also my Subway UBS connects only have 4 wires per USB rather than 5 - Green and white also appear the wrong way around from the factory....:help: See below including unmodified stock connector:-
