My Amiga 600

I think it is time to reveal my Amiga600, as I have finished upgrading it to how I like it. Sure you can get all sorts of accelerators and all that. Though this is not really the way I want to go with my 600. I need it for having an ADF disk writing tool and to have a machine that I might do some light productivity on. It is not really a gaming machine as such. I have however kept it fairly stock, regards to the CPU speed and such. This way I can still test if the ADF files that I have written of old games, are successful and are working as they should.

As I mentioned, it does not have any accelerator installed. I went the memory way instead and installed an 9.5 megabyte Ram upgrade. I have kept to a real floppy drive and I have an 1mb ChipRam upgrade from Individual computers. That is the a604n. I have an IndivisionECS V2 scandoubler installed and the VGA cable is mounted were the RF Modulator used to be sitting. Finally I have installed the AmigaOS 3.1.4 operating system, in order to be able to have a large partition for all them sweet ADF Files.

Uhhh....
I have an KA60 Dual-IDE adaptor, because it takes care of the LED-error (HDD/Floppy-LED) when using an SD Card for storage. And I have an 44pin SD-IDE adaptor installed as well.

Recapping? Yeah Baby!
This is actually the first Amiga, that I bought, after I sold my Amiga 1200, back in 2006. And it came with a board that had defects. That board needed some good refurbishing and needed to be fixed. So I sold that board to a person in England, who are fixing Amiga boards. Then I bought an recapped board from a seller in Hungary (I think), and he is the one that recapped with ceramic capacitors and had removed the RF Modulator. The board is a Revision 1.5 by the way. I am really happy with it. I gave it a refurbished and fixed internal floppy drive as well. Basically it set me back the same as a complete 600. Yeah... Double price for one 600. The good part is that I have a 600, that will last many years from now.

And now for some pictures of my baby. As you can see, it is not completely clean, and it is halfway yellow to the point were people will retrobright. Retrobright is not for me. I will rather let it go yellow and then paint it some funky colour than do the retrobright procedure. Especially now that there will be new keycaps within the next couple of years.

Oh yeah... Pic's or it didn't happen. (So they say)

I have those nifty local, to my country, special key layout on the keyboard.  👍

Time for some update regarding my Amiga600....

As nothing lasts, then the KickStart rom crapped out on me. Yes. It simply died a horrible death.... Well.... Nearly. It does boot the machine and stuff. The issue is, that now I can not use the a6095 memory module anymore. So I went back to the old 2.x (37.350) KickStart. And it is ok for me. I will later check if it runs on my Amiga500-Desktop machine.

The kickrom chip have become really buggy. It does not work perfect in my Amiga500 as well. I have no idea what have happened. The Amiga600, the Ram expansion and the PSU are working perfect. However. This is not the first kickstart chip, that I have had issues with in this machine. Most of the modern chips, simply do not boot in my 600. Original chips do work, are perfectly stable and have no issues at all. Must be the Revision of my board, that is causing all these issues.

And that is not all. I bought an Furia-020 Rev.3 accelerator, in stock configuration. That means 33 Megaherz and becuse I have read that the Furia runs hot, then I bought an active low noise fan for it. I bought it through: Lotharek's Lair...

And yes.... I have put the a6095 up for sale.....

He is making them and he is using the active fan on his overclocked revised version's, so the plan was to have it active cooled in order to keep heat levels down and have the accelerator running as many years as possible. Another good thing about buying from him, is that he will donate some of the money to some of the inventors of the accelerator. And yes. He put a caramel in the package as well. That was a nice surprise that went with it. Love it.

Ohh.... And yes. There are 4 pieces of nylon standoff's to be used when mounting the accelerator. In reality, they are only used to make sure the distance from the board to the accelerator is the same on all 4 sides of the socket. They are not really mounted as such.

Now for some tinkering.... I removed the heatsink. If anyone have ever wondered how it looked under, then look at the picture's below. Then I used some standard thermal paste that I normally use for my vintage P4 and AthlonXP machines. It is nothing fancy, just some white silicone based grease. Good enough for an 68020 Processor. I remembered to clean both the processor and the heatsink with some good old IPA.

Then I connected the fan power cable directly to the accelerator, using pictures of the revised 40 Megaherz Furia, as a refarance for were power can be drawn. I reconed that it was the same pinouts, and I was correct. I also used a zip-tie in order to manage the cable and make a fine result.

And finally.... Here are the pictures of the end result. I have taken out the IDE splitter, because the 40-pin connector's pin's, were too close to the small heatsink for my likings. It works well enough with IDE-to-CF card anyway, and I have never had any use for the 40-pin connector anyway. And to be honest. 2.400 KiloByte/Second transfer rate with Fast-IDE enabled with the Furia, then I have nothing to complain about anyway. Before I installed the Furia, I remembered to clean the 68000 Processor on the motherboard with some IPA as well. Actually just the pins on the 68000, as that is what the Furia need to make contact with. I really hope you like the result. It have become a real beast by now, compared to a stock Amiga600.

CF2IDE+ Adaptor installation...
I have added a small hardware upgrade to my machine. It is an CF2IDE+ adaptor. The reason for this, was to get a tight result with nothing ratteling around. It only gives an extra IDE port as something "extra" in my case. Just as fast as the ribbon cable solution. I just think this looks more professional.

 
Installed a fan...
As my Amiga600 is expanded, it naturally produces a lot of heat. And to counter that, I have installed a fan in the case. The power is drawn from a homemade floppy-drive power cable, that provides power to the fan and the Floppy drive. I mounted the fan, with the use of cable strips or zip ties as some call them. That way I avoid using any glue or other nastyness.

I am done upgrading this machine as of now. Because I do not see any more upgrades as being of any real use to me. Sure USB would be nice, and the same with a battery backed clock. I just do not have any real use for those things as of now.

Hope you had some fun reading all this. I had much fun writing this little post.