A600 to surf on the Internet

[alexandrohipolito]

Is possible use my A600 to surf on the Internet? If not, what upgrade I need to do to put my A600 on the Internet?

[save2600]

You'll more than likely want a PCMCIA Ethernet adapter, more RAM and an 030 accelerator before even considering surfing on an A600. Indivision ECS might come in handy too.

Then you'll need a Browser like iBrowse and a TCP client such as Miami. YAM is a good Mail/Newsreader program.

Depending on what sites you like to visit, the internet experience will more than likely suck though using the above minimum specs. Heck, even on a hi-end legacy system, you'd probably be disappointed. E-mail is fine though.

[Tenacious]

Is possible use my A600 to surf on the Internet? If not, what upgrade I need to do to put my A600 on the Internet?

I did it with a modem, 4 Megs of fast ram, and I think an early version of Aweb back in the early days of WWW.  It wasn't fun, fast or pretty.  Possible though.

OTOH, I still surf with my top A3000 (see signature) sometimes.  Everyone seems to moan about Amiga browsers.  I don't mind them so much.  It's a matter of where you go and what you expect.

[klx300r]

like save 2600 said..it'll be painful to surf the web so I'd save my money on other upgrades for your 600...to put it into perspective for you my 1200 with 030@50 and 32MB Ram is barely acceptable for any type of modern day browsing really so i can't see how your 600 will make the experience any better

[dougal]

Surfing the internet on an Amiga sucks. Sorry to say it but its true. My main Amiga is an A4000T with a Cyberstorm 68060, 128Mb Fast ram, SCSI HD and Picasso IV and despite all this, surfing the web is rubbish.

More than the Amiga being the problem i think its the browser. Both A-Web and I-Browse suck! You can't even go on Facebook with them because they are so outdated.

Somebody should port Firefox.

[jj]

firefox is being ported,  but for AOS4.1

[TCMSLP]

You can browse http://m.facebook.com from any browser though (I use links under Linux!)

Edit: Plus, as far as 'internet' goes, my use is mostly text only (ssh, links, ftp etc) so if your internet use is similar an a600 may well be sufficient, providing you have enough ram to run the tcp/ip stack

[Cammy]

Even though I don't believe IBrowse sucks, it is indeed outdated.

And that FaceBook link does work in IBrowse with a little bit of effort, but it won't work straight away (it will ask you to download the file rather than displaying it).

In any case... what would you expect from such an old, underpowered computer? If like some suggest, you expect to be able to match a brand new PC for the modern web browsing experience, you may be deluding yourself. But if you have realistic expectations and seriously want to explore the online capabilities of the A600, I think you will find there is plenty of fun to be had with one on a weekend as a hobby.

While you may not be able to watch streaming movies, play Flash games or even browse graphical websites (unless you get a rare accelerator), you can still chat on IRC, MSN and Yahoo (via Grapevine and Bitlebee), read newsgroups, send and receive email, download files via HTTP or FTP, explore countless MUDs (the text version of MMORPGs), log into BBSs and more, all on a 2MB A600. You'll even be able to do a couple of those things at the same time in that amount of RAM. But don't expect it to be fast, you'll be experiencing the internet the way it was in the early 90s, which is all you should expect from a computer built in this era.

[drHirudo]

Is possible use my A600 to surf on the Internet? If not, what upgrade I need to do to put my A600 on the Internet?

I used Amiga 600 to surf the net, but it was upgraded. The specs were: Commodore Amiga 600, upgraded with CD1200 PCMCIA controller, M-Tec 630-42 Turboboard (68030/42MHz) 2MB Chip Memory and 8MB Fast, Kickstart 3.0. I used this machine to surf the net back in 1999 for about 4 months, when I upgraded to Amiga A1200. The problem with the little A600 was that it was overheating too much because it was still in the original case. Also I had lots of headache when opening it, then trying to re-seat properly the CPU card and the ROMs.

Using Internet on the Amiga is quite possible and I find it more fun than using other machines. For e-mail, newsgroups, FTP, IRC and even social networks it is pretty good. For listening to streaming radio it is not that okay. But downloading MP3, you can listen them if you lower the quality. For browsing www sites and watching video it is not okay. I was with modem back in 1990-ies, so I turned the graphics off and only read the text. With A600 browsing Aminet, checking e-mails and other causal tasks over the Internet are possible.

[Tenacious]

Even though I don't believe IBrowse sucks, it is indeed outdated.

And that FaceBook link does work in IBrowse with a little bit of effort, but it won't work straight away (it will ask you to download the file rather than displaying it).

In any case... what would you expect from such an old, underpowered computer? If like some suggest, you expect to be able to match a brand new PC for the modern web browsing experience, you may be deluding yourself. But if you have realistic expectations and seriously want to explore the online capabilities of the A600, I think you will find there is plenty of fun to be had with one on a weekend as a hobby.

While you may not be able to watch streaming movies, play Flash games or even browse graphical websites (unless you get a rare accelerator), you can still chat on IRC, MSN and Yahoo (via Grapevine and Bitlebee), read newsgroups, send and receive email, download files via HTTP or FTP, explore countless MUDs (the text version of MMORPGs), log into BBSs and more, all on a 2MB A600. You'll even be able to do a couple of those things at the same time in that amount of RAM. But don't expect it to be fast, you'll be experiencing the internet the way it was in the early 90s, which is all you should expect from a computer built in this era.

Accurate and cleanly said.  I'm sometimes dismayed by folks expecting "a brand new" experience on a 20 year old machine.  The amazing thing about Amigas is what they can do and how they can be extended, especially stuff like www, usb, mp3s, and rtg, that came into existence long after the Amiga was designed.

@  DrHirudo

A MasPlayer might improve sound quality of streaming audio on an A600 (Mp3s will be much improved).  Works great on my other hardware, but, I never tried it specifically on a 600.

[the-topdog]

I picked up a wireless PCMCIA adapter from AmigaKit for a good price and it came with all the software needed to do basic networking and web browsing.  Though, as others have said... You do lose a lot of features and content since the browsers are not modernized.

[TheGoose]

Surf? How does wading strike you?

[BooBoo1200]

Ive been meaning to try whats Netscape or IE like under ShapeShifter?

[tone007]

Surf? How does wading strike you?

Look at this guy, he's surfing like a madman, lack of water be damned!

[Fingers]

(it will ask you to download the file rather than displaying it).

Yeah Cammy, how do you fix this?

PZ.