Amiga A600 (and a Horrible Surprise)

This is my Amiga A600. Quite the controversial machine still (as far as retro stuff goes) and also especially back in the day.

I dug it out because someone has offered to send me his Amiga 68000 programming book to review.

And this is what I saw instead when I tried to boot it up …

Eek!

What to Love (or Hate) About the A600

For me, this is a lovely little computer, but I do understand why in 1992 some people disliked it. It was too little (in size and in offering), too expensive, too late, at a time when the PC community were soaring.

I love how compact it is, plus the design is the classic wedge with a built-in floppy drive that epitomises the time it came from. You could also relatively easily had a hard drive (there was a built-in IDE interface).

For more expansion, it is not bad at all considering the size, plus it has a PCMCIA slot which opens up an amazing set of possibilities that I have yet to tap into (despite having a bunch of similarly equipped handhelds).

On my machine I have upgraded the RAM, switched out the ROM to 3.1.4, and added an internal hard disk as alluded to earlier. Well, it is not really a hard drive but a CF card pretending to be spinning rust, but the Amiga doesn’t know that!

Cause of that Red Screen of Doom

It was the RAM expansion causing the trouble.

The way it works is a daughter board has to sit right on top of the CPU, allowing an FPGA to intercept the instructions coming to and from the pins. Sit being the important part here – it is not firmly attached at all, so it is easy to come unseated, hence the issue.

Not at all surprising seeing as this machine has made two transatlantic trips and been stored not at all comfortably over the years!

Problem Solved!

Well, problem not quite solved, because it will happen again. I need to find a non-permanent way to more firmly attach the board so that breathing near it doesn’t make it at best flaky and at worse acrid smoke come out.

But it is working again, which means I can revisit the youth I never had (we were an Atari ST family and had already moved to the world of the PC when the A600 was originally released).