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).
I had a 1200 that got expanded to have a 68040 with 8MB, an external hard drive and a CD-ROM. I powered it all from a PC PSU that I re-wired. I really liked the Amiga, but the company collapsed. I remember it was owned by Escom for a while. Eventually I gave in and got my first Windows (98) PC. Later I dumped Windows for Linux that had a community that reminded me of the Amiga one in some ways.
I also had a 500 before that. It's all been sold long ago.
When it was time to go 16 bit my brother had just started working full time so he bought the Atari ST when it dropped in price. The Amiga 500 was still more expensive so nobody around us had one. Same reason everyone in my home town had speccy instead of C64, and we all used tapes instead of floppies! :)
Now I have a bunch of Amigas but I also have a couple of STs because they are still my first 16 bit love ;)
I got a 286 PC in 1992 I think, same time the A600 was announced. It was 12mhz and I chose the 40mb hard disk instead of a colour monitor because I wanted it for programming rather than games. That of course changed as the VGA+Sound Blaster PC become the dominant gaming platform :)
My first PC was a Pentium III 350MHz. Not sure what the disk was, but it had some Matrox graphics card and Yamaha sound card I think.
I had a summer job at Texas Instruments around 1984 and had a job of updating BIOS chips in their PCs to support drives bigger than 30MB. I had use of a 'portable' PC that had an early version of Windows. I've seen it all evolve, but my current PC is nothing special as I'm not a gamer.
I don't have the time or concentration for modern games, though I did try when my daughter got into them (xbox and switch etc). Last time I spent serious time on a game it was using DOSBox to play Warcraft II ;)
I played Half Life on my PC and that was about my last one apart from our Wii. Not really played with that for years, but revived it recently for Wii Fit. Games just eat time and I'd rather spend it on other things, such as music.
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