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The Amiga 1200, or A1200, was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market. It was released in October 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom and $599 in the United States.
After Commodore's demise the A1200 was re-launched in 1995 by Escom. The new Escom A1200s were released with Kickstart V40.63 (3.1), and the new units were priced at 1992 levels.
Like its predecessor, the A500, it featured an all-in-one design incorporating the CPU, keyboard, and disk drives (including, unlike the A500, the option of an internal hard disk drive) in one physical unit.
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 graphics capabilities stood up well in comparison to the competition the Amiga no longer commanded the lead as it had in earlier times.
- The Amiga's custom chips cost more to produce than the commodity chips utilized in PCs, making the A1200 relatively more expensive to the PCs in contrast to earlier Amiga models.
- Fewer retailers carried the A1200, especially in the United States.
- The Amiga 1200 received bad press for being incompatible with a number of Amiga 500 games.
Although Commodore never released any official sales figures, it is estimated that Commodore shipped fewer than 1 million A1200s worldwide before going bankrupt in April 1994.
Technical information
Processor and RAM
The A1200 utilized a Motorola MC68EC020 CISC CPU (roughly four times faster than the 68000 processor in the Amiga 500). It is noteworthy that, like the 68000, the 68EC020 had a 24-Bit expansion bus; allowing for a theoretical maximum of 16 Megabytes 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 256MB on 2 128MB SIMMs), real time clock, IDE ports and other enchantments.
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, but not much else.
The A1200 also offered improved audio abilities which allowed for higher sampling rate for sound playback.
Peripherals and expansion
In addition to ports one could expect on all earlier Amiga models the A1200 featured a memory/CPU slot, a PCMCIA slot and a feature unique to the A1200 - a clockport.
The clockport was a remnant of an abandoned design feature (real time clock and Chip RAM expansion) and was used for, among other things, audio cards.
If one was willing to forgo the A1200's form fitting case PCI and Zorro busses could also be added to the A1200, allowing PCI or Zorro graphics/sound and network cards to be added. Eyetech and Power Computing built and supplied many PC tower kits to 'tower up' the A1200 and in essence convert it to a 'big box' Amiga, even allowing for use of PC AT Keyboards.
One problematic factor for expanding the A1200 was the rather limited 23 watt power supply. Hard drives and even external floppies could stress the power supply too much. This was usually alleviated by 'towering up' the Amiga as it allowed for use of much more capable power supplies. The problem could also be mitigated by replacing the A1200's factory default power supply with a much more powerful A500 power supply.
Software
The first incarnation of the A1200 was bundled with AmigaOS 3.0 and ...
Summary
- CPU: Motorola 68EC020 (14.32 MHz NTSC, 14.18 MHz PAL).
- Chipset: AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)
- Memory:
- Removable Storage:
- Internal Storage:
- ATA-Controller supporting PIO-2 transfer mode.
- Input/Output connections:
- Composite TV out (PAL versions sold in Europe and Australia, NTSC elsewhere).
- Analogue 15 kHz RGB video plug (DB23)
- RCA audio plugs
- 2 x Game/Joy ports (DE9)
- RS232 Serial port
- Centronics Parallel port (DB25)
- Port for external floppy drive (DB23)
- 16-bit PCMCIA-Slot
- 150 pin local expansion port (trapdoor)
- Clockport
- Other characteristics
- Weight: 8 lb.
- Size: 9.5" deep x 18.5" wide x 3" high
- Integrated keyboard with 96 keys (including 10 function keys and a numeric keypad)
- Software (Bundled):
- AmigaOS 3.0-3.1 operation system. (Kickstart 3.0-3.1/Workbench 3.0-3.1)
Advantages over the low-cost Amiga 600
- 24-Bit palette (12-Bit on A600)
- HAM-8 and 8-Bit color modes
- Numeric keypad
- Faster CPU
- Expansion slot and clock port
- Can run AGA games and applications
Trivia
- The Escom A1200 models were fitted with PC style 'High Density' internal drives that had been downgraded to Double Density drives. This resulted in some software not working. (PC style drives do not supply a "ready" signal, which signals if there is a floppy in the disk drive.) *
- 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 than one can expect from, say, a IBM PC.
References
- Gareth Knight (2005). "Commodore Amiga 1200". Retrieved May. 22, 2006.
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"Amiga 1200"