Worth getting an Amiga 600?

[psxphill]

Long the unwanted street urchin of the Amiga world, the 600 is becoming quite popular these days - a slew of new expansions have been developed that break past the traditional expandability barriers that kept the 600 from achieving the higher performance of other models.

So what it boils down to is: do you want an Amiga in a very small footprint at the expense of the numeric pad? If so, then go for the 600

It's getting quite popular because of the Vampire/Apollo. But unless you want an A600 or are desperate to get hold of these upgrades today (which I believe is quite difficult) then it's probably not that great an idea.

I think it's too early to say whether the A600 will get thrown back onto the streets again.

[psxphill]

I don't expect it to be thrown back in the streets again. The last couple of years, the A600 finally reached maturity and I expect it is here to stay.

Excluding the vampire it hasn't caught up with what was available for the a1200 twenty years ago. The vampire is only on the a600 because there were no accelerators for it. Once it's done then the a1200 version is likely to be better and sell more.

Sure if you absolutely must have a small footprint amiga with a painfully slow and incompatible ide and pcmcia bus, or hate numeric keypads. Then an A600 is great. I wouldn't expect it to be the development mule for the next generation of vampire though.

[psxphill]

Can you explain why the A600's IDE and PCMCIA bus is incompatible?
It's working for me without any problems.

I don't know why, I just know that some IDE drives won't work properly.

Relatively few PCMCIA cards have ever had drivers written and when I tried to hook up some new hardware then I could access the tuples but not the rest of the card.

I think the way they hooked it up either violates the spec, or doesn't talk exactly like a PC. As IDE drives and PCMCIA cards were created for and only tested with PC's, then you sometimes get problems because the devices themselves violate the spec.

I'd say the A600 is the hottest Amiga since the unreleased A3000+ we should have received back in 1990 the latest.

Why just look at this:

GASP! Photoshop.... your high school art teacher said it wasn't possible on an "outdated" Amiga.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W5d_y7FcpdI

STAR WARS GAMES???!!! Yes game companies colluded /  conspired to create the false narrative that such stuff was impossible on the Amiga to drive more lucrative PC and Mac sales.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gumNvcrIOj0

UAE FAST PC emulator Workbench Installs on an AMIGA!!!??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OgjRtPyMs5U

Gotta love the Vampire team. Where official "IP" holders fail to deliver even one product they deliver THREE fully developed upgrades in one product.

That software isn't running on a a600, it's running on a vampire. The a600 is just being used for the keyboard and mouse.
Deciding to make it for the a600 first was essentially random. If you want an a600 and a vampire then great. However an a500 and a vampire, or an a1200 and a vampire will be just as good. Maybe they will do a Macintosh upgrade next.

The A3000+ was better than the A4000 but it certainly wouldn't have kept the Amiga going for any longer. It was always the cheaper amigas that made the huge sales and the A1200 was generally regarded as being a good design. It didn't have the DSP, but I'm not sure you'd get it at the price point that the A1200 sold at anyway. Launched in 1990 the A1200 would likely have cost a lot more, especially if it was better than what actually launched. The Archimedes A3000 had things that would have been nice on the Amiga, but it was twice the price.