We somehow managed to find an Amiga 600 for sale!
It is stock, 1mb if ram with a 37.300 ROM but it does have workbench disks. With all being well ill be able to rig this thing out!
Pictures and more to follow as I’m on a train to the airport.
Just got back from the UK, and check it out!
On my way out of Italy, it was kind of funny as the security checkpoint people immediately recognized the Amiga 600, pulled it out of the line, and started to wave it around, so that others could come by to check it out, then they put it through the x-ray machine and took pictures.. Sadly I couldn’t take pictures.  But it was slightly amusing.  I guess you had to be there.
Also check this out, I think this game is Amiga 500 / AmigaDOS 1.2 only .. But it crashes with the good old fashioned Guru Meditation…
Now if only I had a serial port I could use this method of transferring ADF files..
Watch out for 37.300, it contains a bug which _will_ yield constant filesystem corruption on “big” CF cards (or HDDs). Better use 37.350, or rather what I did: a 3.1 kick… Then I put the 37.300 in my HD-less 500, because OS 2.x runs more utils than 1.x.
The A600 is the perfect machine to realize how A4000/PPC-centric were+are the Amiga users. Just try to use any program that uses the absolutely horrible MUI toolkit, like a “simple” IRC client: AmIRC… Since the PCMCIA slot will be in use by the ethernet adapter (therefore no +4Mb SRAM), AmIRC will “quickly” (takes 30 seconds even to start) evaporate all (with expansion: 2Mb) the memory, subsequently freezing the Amiga, all the while being horribly slow like Windows 95 on a 386…
The hilarious part is that the PPC stuff is overpriced and basically useless.
MUI is garbage – it also shows why people were lining up for Windows 95 and Macintoshes – hell, even OS/2 was better – no hunting for libraries, no hassle of them pretending they’re the star of the show (MUI, all you needed was a control panel and library, not an entire folder) – but you can still get PCMCIA networking for them easily.
They might not have been as good as the Amiga, but the user experience was a lot better. Linux gave you a CLI that wasn’t shit, Windows 95 gave you hardware and apps, OS/2 gave you whatever OS/2 did, and anyone could figure out how a Mac worked.
Sorry, just want to get that off my chest. Amigas are cool but very overrated. If I could take any hardware offered at the time, I’d go for a 040 Mac or a really fast 486. Bettter UI, and more software even if they were inferior.
Commodore was run more like a pump/dump stock scheme which ultimately brought it down. Bad timing in their stock cycle + one frivolous patent lawsuit ended them.
They were doomed to eventual failure anyways, in this era of software patent racketeering.
Although the attempts at Hombre were interesting – PA-RISC, maybe NT in my Amiga, typical advanced Amiga graphics? lolwut?
Yeah the whole hombre thing is kind of interesting.. But ultimately if they had pulled it off in some fashion, it would be a stand alone CD-32 like device, from the sounds of it, more of a Dreamcast.. which worked so well for Sega.
And even if that all panned out, the whole Itanium thing would have crushed the whole effort.
Oh those elusive 23-way D-connectors for the serial and the video… I don’t think I’ve ever seen them anywhere except for the Amiga series.
Yeah… Once uppon a time I made my own VGA out with a DB25 that I had to take a hacksaw to… Now even DB-25 serial ports are a rarity!
As the author of the serial-to-amiga article you linked to: my laptop doesn’t have a serial port either. I assembled a contraption from a USB-to-serial adapter, null-modem cable and a 9-to-25-pin converter. It works flawlessly but it looks like something straight from Dr. Who.