Amiga 600 Restoration & Upgrades

I’ve been slowly but surely branching out into Amigas from Commodore’s 8-bit range of computers, and as such I recently got my hands on my first Commodore Amiga 600.

The A600 is a 16-bit computer from the 1990s, and is effectively just a condensed version of the A500 with an onboard IDE and PCMCIA interface.

This A600 was a bit of a basket case, not only in need of a good clean and service, but also some repairs – the computer would not boot correctly, only showing a black screen on startup, and the internal 3.5″ FDD would not load disks (even in another machine).

As it turned out, both of these faults were down to the Achilles’ heel of the later Amigas. Unlike the A500 which was manufactured using through-hole electrolytic capacitors, the A1200 and its little brother the A600 primarily use surface-mount (SMD) electrolytic capacitors – these capacitors are especially unreliable and frequently leak, causing a lot of problems in this era of computers.

One electrolytic capacitor in the A600 reset circuit is known to cause black screen faults.

I therefore replaced all of the electrolytic capacitors on the mainboard using new capacitors with a solid electrolyte, which won’t suffer from leakage in future – see my general advice for capacitor replacement for more detailed information on the process.

The mainboard needs to be removed from the case, and the RF shield and plastic insulating layer removed by undoing the fixing nuts on the rear ports. I typically desolder the keyboard connector as this gives better access to the two SMD capacitors along the rear edge of the mainboard.

After testing, the A600 appeared to be working fine again – happy days! Time for some upgrades – both for cosmetics and for performance.

First off, I installed a new case as the original was quite rough; I then installed a new 3.5″ FDD, as the original didn’t work; I also dismantled and cleaned the keyboard.

Then, I fitted a KickStart 3.1 ROM, internal IDE-CF adaptor, and an internal WorkBench 3.1 CF card, a solid-state equivalent of a HDD; I also fitted a 1MB Chip RAM expansion with onboard RTC which fits into the PCB’s expansion slot, and a 4MB Fast RAM expansion which fits on top of the CPU; I also fitted a new keyboard membrane.

I’ve also had some Amiga 1200s on the bench – including my own, pictured below alongside the A600 – also requiring recaps. These will be appearing on the blog soon.