Maxing Out an Amiga 600 Part 1

TAKE AN A600 TO THE MAX

I have wanted an Amiga 600 for some time now, just for this one task of maxing it out as far as it is possible as the A600 is seen as the least expandable.

For Christmas, this year, I received an Amiga 600, YEAH. So what did I get to upgrade it and where can I go with those upgrades?

What did I get?

I got a fully boxed, including polys, Amiga 600 The Wild, The Weird and The Wicked  bundle along with a 2MB PCMCIA expansion, an 8GB compact flash with loads of stuff on it including OS 2.05, a 1MB trapdoor expansion with real time clock and several discs, all of which are originals.

The Wild, The Weird and The Wicked

What did I want to do with it?

I wanted to take it to the max, this for me would be to acquire an A600 v2 Vampire board, however these are not available at the moment so how much memory can I put in it? What is the most up to date OS that can run on it? Can I get SATA drives to work on it? Can I get USB?

What I have Done So Far

There are a few things I knew I could do virtually straight away so I went to AmigaKit to see what hardware was available, my first purchase was the Kickstart 3.1 ROM and an OS3.1 Compact Flash card which I had ordered before the end of Christmas day, two days later they turned up and shortly thereafter I had an A600 booting into OS3.1.

A600 with Kickstart 3.1 and OS 3.1 CF card, also 1mb Trapdoor Expansion

A600 with Kickstart 3.1 and OS 3.1 CF card, also 1mb Trapdoor Expansion showing amount of memory

OS3.1 was a great place to begin but this was not the end and within the next hour it was brought to my knowledge that an A600 v2 Vampire board was available on ebay, OMG I had to have it but there were still 21 hours before the end of the auction so left it for now.

I knew USB was possible even for the lowly A600 so back to AmigaKit and a few searches on Google to see what hardware was available. I finally found that the 1MB trapdoor could be replaced with the A604n Memory Expansion for Amiga 600 with 1MB onboard and the Real Time Clock Module (RTC).

Newly Purchased A604n with real time clock

Showing only slight change in memory allocation after changing trapdoor expansion

The A604n and RTC would also allow me to add a scandoubler at a later date and also has a connector for a Subway USB controller, trouble is the Subway is not available on AmigaKit, a bit more Googling and I found that the Rapid Road is another USB controller and should work with the A604n. I have purchased the Rapid Road and should find out if it works in the next couple of days.

Oh yeah, just before posting this I bid and won the Vampire that was on ebay…

Part 2 to follow after adding the Rapid Road.

Michael Holmes