Amiga 1200
 | |
| Type | Personal computer |
|---|---|
| Release date | October 1992 |
| Discontinued | 1996 |
| Operating system | Amiga OS 3.0 - 3.1 |
| CPU | Motorola 68EC020 @ 14 MHz |
| Memory | 2 MB |
| Predecessor | Amiga 600 |
| Successor | Amiga 4000 |
The Amiga 1200, or A1200, was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market. It was launched in October 21, 1992, at a base price of 399 GBP in the United Kingdom and 599 USD in the United States. Initially, only 30 000 A1200s were available at the UK launch.[1]
Like its predecessor, the Amiga 500, the A1200 is an all-in-one design incorporating the CPU, keyboard, and disk drives (including the option of an internal 2,5" inch hard disk drive) in one physical unit. The A1200 was similar to the Atari Falcon, which was the A1200's most direct competitor, and shared hardware with the Amiga CD32 game console.[2]
During the first year of its life the system reportedly sold well and the future looked good for the Amiga 1200, but Commodore ran into cash flow problems and soon went bankrupt.[3] World wide sales figures for the Amiga 1200 up are unknown but there were 95 thousand A1200 systems sold in Germany before Commodore's bankruptcy.[4]
After Commodore’s demise the A1200 almost disappeared off the market but the system was re-launched by Escom in 1995. The new Escom A1200 price was set to £399 and it came bundled with two games, seven applications and Amiga OS 3.1.[5] It was criticized for being priced 150 pounds higher than what the Commodore variant had sold for two years prior and was taken off the market some time during 1996 as the parent company folded.[6]
Popularity
Although a significant upgrade, the A1200 proved not to be as popular as the earlier Amiga 500. There were a number of reasons for this:
- While its Advanced Graphics Architecture graphics capabilities stood up well in comparison to the competition, when compared to VGA and its emerging extensions, the Amiga no longer commanded the lead it had in earlier times.
- The Amiga's custom chips cost more to produce than the commodity chips utilized in PCs, making the A1200 more expensive, relative to PCs, than earlier Amiga models.[citation needed]
- Fewer retailers carried the A1200, especially in the United States.
- Fourth generation console gaming systems were less expensive and almost as capable at gaming, which had been a major use of the Amiga 500.
- The Amiga 1200 received bad press for being incompatible with a number of Amiga 500 games.
- Some industry commentators felt a 68020 CPU was too old and slow to be competitive, and that the machine should have been fitted with at least an '030. Complaints were also made about the capabilities of the AGA chipset. Commodore had earlier been first working on a much improved version of the original Amiga chipset, codenamed "AAA", but when that fell behind they'd rushed out the much less improved AGA found on the A1200/A4000/CD32 units. It had been working on an improved chipset, codenamed "Hombre" when it went bankrupt.
While Commodore never released any official sales figures, Commodore Frankfurt gave a figure of 95 thousand Amiga 1200 systems sold in Germany.[4]
Technical information
Processor and RAM
The A1200 utilized the Motorola MC68EC020 CISC CPU (roughly four times faster than the 68000 processor in the A500). It is noteworthy that, like the 68000, the 68EC020 had a 24-Bit address space; allowing for a theoretical maximum of 16 MB[7] of memory.
It shipped with 2 MB of Chip RAM. Chip RAM could not be expanded beyond those 2 MB, but an additional 8 MB of Fast RAM could be added through use of the trapdoor expansion slot.
Later, various accelerators featuring 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060 and PowerPC processors were made available by third parties. Such accelerators did not only have faster CPUs but also more and faster memory (on the most expensive boards 256 MB on two 128 MB SIMMs), real time clocks, IDE and SCSI ports and video cards.
Graphics and sound
The A1200 shipped with Commodore's third-generation chipset, the Advanced Graphics Architecture or AGA. As the name implies, the AGA chipset had superior graphical abilities in comparison with the earlier chipsets.
The A1200's faster CPU also allowed for higher sampling rates for sound playback, however the basic sound hardware was not upgraded and remains identical to the original Amiga 1000.
Peripherals and expansion
The A1200 featured Amiga compatible connectors including two DE9M ports for joysticks, mice, and light pens, a standard 25-pin RS-232 serial port and a 25-pin Centronics parallel port. As a result the A1200 was compatible with many existing Amiga peripherals, such as external floppy disk drives, MIDI interfaces, sound samplers and video digitizers. It was also designed to be able to house a 2,5" inch HDD internally, but it was possible to mount a 3.5inch HDD inside the 1200 if a little brute force was used.
Like the earlier Amiga 600 the A1200 featured a PCMCIA Type II slot and an internal 44-pin ATA interface both most commonly seen on laptop computers. In addition the A1200 featured a 32-bit CPU/RAM expansion slot and a feature unique to the A1200, the so called 'clock port'.
The clock port was a remnant of an abandoned design feature for addition of internal RAM and a real time clock. Later, third-party developers put it to use by creating an array of expansions for the A1200, such as, high performance I/O cards, audio cards and even a USB controller.
The 16-bit PCMCIA Type II interface allowed use of a number of compatible peripherals available for the laptop market, though only 16-bit (Type II) PCMCIA cards are hardware compatible, newer 32-bit PC Card or CardBus peripherals are incompatible. The PCMCIA implementation is almost identical to the one featured on the earlier A600. A number of Amiga peripherals were released by third-party developers for this connector including SRAM cards, CD-ROM controllers, SCSI controllers, network cards, sound samplers and video digitizers. Later, a number of compatible laptop peripherals have been made to operate with this port including, serial modems, wired and wireless network cards and CompactFlash adaptors.
One problematic factor for expanding the A1200 was the rather limited 23 watt power supply. Hard disks and even external floppy drives could stress the power supply leading to system instability. The problem could be mitigated by replacing the default power supply with a higher rated supply, such as the one supplied with the A500.
If one was willing to forgo the A1200's form-fitting desktop case in exchange for further expansion options it was possible to re-house the hardware into alternate casing. Several third-party developers built and supplied kits to 'tower up' the A1200 and in essence convert it to a 'big box' Amiga. These expansion kits allowed use of PC AT Keyboards, hard disk bays, CD-ROM drives, and Zorro II , Zorro III and PCI expansion slots. Such expansion slots made it possible to use devices not originally intended for the A1200, such as, graphic, sound and network cards.
The revision of the A1200 manufactured by Escom was fitted with PC-based 'High Density' floppy disk drives that had been downgraded to Double Density drives. This resulted in some software incompatibility (PC style drives do not supply a "ready" signal, which signals if there is a floppy in the disk drive.)[8] Escom released a free circuit upgrade to correct this issue.
Operating System
The first incarnation of the A1200 shipped with AmigaOS 3.0, consisting of Workbench 3.0 and Kickstart 3.0 (revision 39.106), which together provided standard single-user operating system functionality and support for the built-in hardware. The later Amiga Technologies/Escom models shipped with AmigaOS 3.1 and Kickstart 3.1, though earlier A1200 models could be upgraded by installing compatible Kickstart 3.1 ROM chips. The later AmigaOS 3.5 and 3.9 releases were A1200 compatible as pure software updates requiring Kickstart 3.1.
AmigaOS 4, a PowerPC native release of the operating system, can be used with the A1200 provided compatible PowerPC hardware is installed. Likewise, MorphOS, an alternative Amiga specific operating system can be used with this hardware.
Variants of platform-independent operating systems such as Linux and BSD can also be used with the A1200.
Specifications
- CPU: Motorola 68EC020 at 14.32 MHz (NTSC) or 14.18 MHz (PAL)
- Chipset: AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)
- Memory:
- Removable Storage:
- 3.5" DD floppy disk drive, capacity 880 kB
- Internal Storage:
- ATA-Controller supporting PIO-2 transfer mode[clarification needed]
- Input/Output connections:
- Analogue RGB video out (DB-23M)
- Composite video out (RCA)
- RF audio/video out (RCA)
- Audio out (2 × RCA)
- 2 × Mouse/Joypad ports (DE9)
- RS-232 serial port (DB-25M)
- Centronics style parallel port (DB-25F)
- Floppy disk drive port (DB-23F)
- 16-bit Type II PCMCIA slot
- 150 pin local expansion port (trapdoor)
- Clockport
- Other characteristics
- Weight: 3.6 kg (8 lb).
- Size: 24.1 cm deep, 47.0 cm wide, 7.62 cm high (9.5" × 18.5" × 3")
- Integrated keyboard with 96 keys (including 10 function keys and a numeric keypad)
- Operating System:
- AmigaOS 3.0 or 3.1. (Kickstart 3.0-3.1/Workbench 3.0-3.1)
Advantages over the low-cost Amiga 600
- AGA graphics chipset
- 24-Bit color palette (12-Bit on A600)
- HAM-8 and 8-Bit color modes
- Improved sprite graphics
- Faster graphics performance
- 2 MB of Amiga Chip RAM by default
- Faster CPU (68EC020 vs 68000)
- Expansion slot and clock port
- Numeric keypad
Bundled Software
Software officially bundled with the A1200 included Deluxe Paint IV AGA (2D image and animation editor) and Final Copy (word processor).[9] The Amiga Technologies/Escom version was bundled with applications, such as, Scala (multimedia authoring software) and Wordworth (word processor).
Trivia
 | This article contains a list of miscellaneous information. (August 2008) |
- The A1200 far outlived its shelf life, despite being only a desktop-based home computer. This was made possible by third party expansions released long after the Amiga disappeared from shops.
- Because the unit's built-in memory was shared between the CPU and the sound and video chips, making it slow, adding additional RAM (so called "Fast RAM", which wasn't shared) increased the A1200's speed to a larger degree (double: ~2.26x) than one would expect on, say, an IBM PC.
- The A1200 motherboard is inscribed with "Channel Z", which is a reference to the B-52's song.
- New Old Stock Amiga 1200's, manufactured by Amiga Technologies, are still currently available from various online retailers, like Amigakit.com and vesalia.
See also
References
- ^ Amiga Format "New Amiga 1200" (Issue 41, December 1992)
- ^ "Commodore Amiga 1200". Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ "Chronological History of Commodore Computer". Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ a b Gareth Knight. "Commodore-Amiga Sales Figures". Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ "Amiga Magic bundle". Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ "Amiga III Technologies". Retrieved 30 November 2009.
- ^ In this article, the conventional prefixes denote base-2 values whereby “kilobyte” (KB) = 210 bytes , “megabyte” (MB) = 220 bytes and “gigabyte” (GB) = 230 bytes.
- ^ Thor Bernhardsen. "Amiga floppy woes...". Retrieved July. 12, 2006.
- ^ Kevin J. Klasmeier. "Falcon030 -vs- 1200 -vs- Performa 400". Retrieved Oct. 20, 2006.