A600hd

[Guille64]

Hello everyone!
After several months of waiting, finally I found my A600 witch I sold two years ago.
It is a A600HD with 4gb hard disk and 1mb of ram and a 4mb svram card.
The CD adaptor and an Green alien edition of the classic workbench.
Everything is fine, but... I want to know if it is possible to run games from whdload. It is the question of my existence (Amiga existence). Because if it is not possible, there the HD is useless for me (I want to play games).
I know that there are many opinions, but not all the A600 system are the same.

Thank you all!

Guillermo.

[Matt_H]

You'll be able to run a lot, but not everything (some WHDLoad installs require a 68010 or better). Adding another meg of Chip RAM to the trapdoor will help, too.

[tokyoracer]

It will be hard on just 2MB RAM and just a 68000 but it can be done. Might be possible to overclock the CPU but not certain on that.

[Colani1200]

If I read you correctly you already have 4 MB fast. I have an A600 with only 2 mb chip in my living room and I am using it for whdload with an infrared joypad. Most of the games that are important to me work fine, some are loading too slow to be usable, some don't work at all but still there's quite a bunch that works just fine.

[Matt_H]

It will be hard on just 2MB RAM and just a 68000 but it can be done. Might be possible to overclock the CPU but not certain on that.

No use overclocking the CPU. It's not the speed of the newer 680x0 chips that's important, it's the VBR found in the 68010 and higher. A lot of installs make use of it.

[Cammy]

I use my A600 with 2MB ChipRAM and 2MB PCMCIA SRAM for WHDLoad games all the time. Most of them work without a problem on my setup, so I'm assuming with 4MB FastRAM you shouldn't have too many problems, although I'd recommend you get an A603 for that extra meg of ChipRAM and complete the job. If you're not afraid of unscrewing the A600 and opening it up, I'd recommend you get a Kickstart ROM Switcher with 1.3 and 3.1 ROMs on it, then you'll have the best WHDLoad system as well as something that'll have a heck of a lot less problems playing old floppy disk games. I have this in my A600 and it's been really handy for some of those older games that don't have WHDLoad installs yet.

ClassicWB is a good place to start if you're setting up an Amiga as a WHDLoad games machine, all you need to do now is download and extract the games you want onto your hard drive, and make sure you have the ROM images in your Workbench: Devs/Kickstarts/ drawer. Registering WHDLoad will make all your games load up faster too.

[Guille64]

Thank you all!
I have always think that the A600 would be a good games machine using whdload. I am happy to found it again!
I will try to upgrade to rom 3.1 too.
The only thing that I must to find a solution is the monitor problem: I not longer have one, and the CD32 runs well with Svideo and a sinth card to a VGA monitor, but with the A600 (pal-b) it's different. Maybe I will give a chance to my LCD TV and see what happens.

Regards

Guillermo.

[TjLaZer]

Green alien edition of the classic workbench.

Whats that?

[ferix]

Whats that?

just this: http://classicwb.abime.net/classicweb/gaae.htm

[Matt_H]

Thank you all!
I have always think that the A600 would be a good games machine using whdload. I am happy to found it again!
I will try to upgrade to rom 3.1 too.
The only thing that I must to find a solution is the monitor problem: I not longer have one, and the CD32 runs well with Svideo and a sinth card to a VGA monitor, but with the A600 (pal-b) it's different. Maybe I will give a chance to my LCD TV and see what happens.

Regards

Guillermo.

Yep, you should be able to connect to a TV through the composite video port, but the picture quality won't be very good. There are a few internal mods to get SVideo out of an A600 - DJBase here at Amiga.org makes one such board. There's another fellow here, whose name escapes me at the moment, who makes an external card that plugs into the RGB port that provides SVideo.

[Guille64]

One thing that I am not sure is if I will see colours or black and white via composite.
Another thing is that the image could vary according to the quality of the composite cable, isn't it?

Thanks

[Cammy]

The A600 outputs colour composite. It was the old A500, without an A520 plugged in, that had a black & white composite output. Your A600 also has a built-in TV modulator to output an RF signal, even blurrier than Composite but it's there in case Composite doesn't work.

I guess you really need yourself an S-Video adapter! I have a few of these, I use them on my A1200, A600 and A500. I use both large CRT TVs as well as LCD TVs with them, and the LCD TVs even remove the flickering from interlaced modes (no need for a flicker-fixer now). You can get S-Video adapters, backup EPROMs, PSU adapters and other handy hardware at http://amigamaniac.com

[Guille64]

Thank you Cammy!
I use the CD32 with Svideo and an external sint to my PC monitor and works great. I guess my LCD doesn't have Svideo (Samsung 32"). Maybe the better way without a 1084 would be the Svideo adaptor to the external sint and the PC monitor. Now I remember that when I tried to use a Svideo adaptor (no longer have it) I saw without red, maybe because the A600 is PAL-B.

[Guille64]

Well, finally I have my A600 HD again. I am glad and I must say that WHDLoad runs ok even without clicking the mouse buttons at the start to free memory. I am using 1mb base and a sram card with 4mb extra. By the way using composite with my LCD runs ok too. Almost like S-video.
I am really happy, the A600 is just a wonderful computer!

[Guille64]

The A600 outputs colour composite. It was the old A500, without an A520 plugged in, that had a black & white composite output. Your A600 also has a built-in TV modulator to output an RF signal, even blurrier than Composite but it's there in case Composite doesn't work.

I guess you really need yourself an S-Video adapter! I have a few of these, I use them on my A1200, A600 and A500. I use both large CRT TVs as well as LCD TVs with them, and the LCD TVs even remove the flickering from interlaced modes (no need for a flicker-fixer now). You can get S-Video adapters, backup EPROMs, PSU adapters and other handy hardware at http://amigamaniac.com

I have a problem with my A600 and the LCD viewed with composite:
In workbench and some games the colours flash generally when the game is loading (in those who run well) and flash anytime in others. Otherwise the image quality is good enough.
Now I am working in the build of another A600 (slightly different). I will see if the problem remains on this one too.

Regards,