What do you need?
Well, there is a long list of things you will need. Quite some of the items necessary to upgrade the A600 cannot be purchased anymore.
Ebay therefore might be your main source for equipment, especially the Apollo accelerator or an Amiga 600 if you do not own one yet.
I managed to buy a brand new Apollo in spring 2002 at an Italian shop
called Dbline. They might be out of
stock by now, though. The Apollo is quite rare, prices therefore will be quite high. If you don't want to spend considerable money upgrading your old A600, don't
upgrade it! The upgrade of my Amiga 600 cost approximately 600 €.
The Apollo can take one EDO SIMM for memory. It supports 32 MByte of memory at the max. Most 32 MByte EDO SIMMs are double sided. Try to get a single sided SIMM as this might run more stable. Not all single sided SIMMs work however.
Be sure you have an Amiga with a main board revision 1.1. I have also heard from Tore Bjoernsen that he has managed to get the Apollo running with the newer rev 1.5 board. Most people however report problems with rev 1.3 boards (and so do I!). Unfortunately the rev 1.3 board seems to be the most frequent, so you may quite well have one of these. If you do and don't want to buy another A600
then better don't try to
upgrade. The following picture shows the revision number sign on my A600
board. You will find the revision in the lower right hand corner of
every A600's motherboard:
On www.amiga-hardware.com you will find other A600 board revisions numbered 2B and 2D. I have never seen one of these and don't know if the Apollo runs stable on these.
Although the Apollo card can be found with up to 50 MHz, avoid the latter. The Apollo is hard to get stabilized at 40 MHz, above all if you want to use a FPU, too (if you plan to install Linux, you have to have one!). The 33 MHz version might be the most stable but
is the slowest, too. Most Apollos seem to have been sold with overclocked CPUs and FPUs. Don't run it too long without extra cooling!
If you want to connect the A600 to your home network, you can do so with a PCMCIA network card. Make sure that the card is supported by the cnet.device found on Aminet. If it's not, you won't succeed getting connected. Although I will not go into detail with regards to the software installation
(there are other Amiga pages on the Web that will help you) you also need a TCP/IP stack ("Miami" for example; Amiga OS 3.9 comes with a built in
one that can be
used). "SMB handler" is nice if you want to talk to your Windows / Linux PCs and servers sharing folders and files with Microsofts SMB protocol. And of course you can make the A600 a SAMBA server itself.
If you want to replace the old casing of your
Amiga 600 by a brand new one, Vesalia
still sell brand new Amiga 600 cases and keyboards for only 7 €!
You can use any 2.5 inch hard drive you want in the Amiga 600. You will however need a cable that fits the
narrow 2.5 inch IDE connector. The hard drive also gets power through this connector. Keep in mind that the Amiga OS is very memory efficient. A 500 to 1000 MByte hard drive will suffice easily. If you want to install other operating systems like Linux or MacOS, too, you will however need a larger disk.
If the hard disk you plan to use is larger than 4 GB, you will need at
least Amiga OS 3.5 (3.1 will only work with some patches).
You will need fans (both ventilators and people who like you). I recommend special laptop fans that will fit directly on the 68030 and 68882 (FPU) and are very low even with a small heat sink connected.
3.5 cm by 3.5 cm will be best for the 68030. 2.5 cm by 2.5 cm for the 68882. One additional bigger fan that will take care of removing the heated air out of the box is highly recommended!
See the page about cooling for a
recommendation how to fit these fans.
Most A600 PSUs are too weak for an acceleratored A600. Most PSUs deliver 2,5 A max. Don't use one of these.
The less frequent 4,5 A PSUs MIGHT work. There are also some 25 A PSUs on the market. These should be okay
but are expensive. The least expensive way (but the most complicated, too) is to
connect an old PC (non ATX)
PSU. See the PSU page how to do so.
