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The Amiga A1000 was the first commercially produced Amiga to hit the market, arriving in the US in October of 1984 and the rest of the world in November of 1984. The A1000 featured a 68 pin dual in-line 68000 processor with an output at 7MHz, 256 KB of RAM, and as packaged into a neat and aesthetically pleasing case, complete with a space under the front of the machine to house the keyboard. A second 256 KB RAM module was offered an optional extra, yielding a half of a megabyte of memory.
During the mid-1980s, Amiga led the way with new features such as its wide array of screen colors, 4096 out of a palette of 16.8 million. The Amiga was also capable of playing sounds and recorded sound files, as well as speaking in a computerized voice.
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Unveiled in early 1993, the A1200 represented a new direction for the Amiga. Firstly, it featured a much more powerful processor than the earlier Amigas, a Motorola 68020, as opposed to a 68000. It was a 32-bit processor running at 14.28MHz, with an all-new custom chipset, the "AGA" or Advanced Graphics Architecture system, coupled with Kickstart 3.0.
The AGA system was a huge revision over what is now considered OCS (original chipset, as found in the A1000, A500, A1500, A2000 and the A2500) and over the ECS (enhanced chipset, as in the A500+, the A600 and the A3000), allowing 256 simultaneous colours without clever trickery, and up to 262,144 colours using very complex palette shifting techniques, for which the A500 was famous.
It was much criticised upon its launch, since only an estimated 60% of software would work on it, but for a machine which was almost a complete groun-up redesign over its predecessors, this has to be something of an achievement. Also unlike all of its predecessors, it was fitted with 2MB RAM as standard, upgradable to 10MB. As for interfaces, it featured the PCMCIA ('credit card') slot on the left-hand side, and an IDE interface inside to connect a hard drive to.
It was not that long ago that some aspiring electronics people converted the A1200 out of its normal case into a more common tower case, although this involves a lot of reworking to the motherboard. It is rumoured to be possible to buy A1200 motherboards, though it is not known who supplies then, for it is almost certain that none or few have been manufactured in some years.
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The A4000 was the last Amiga Commodore designed before going into liquidation in 1994, and was launched at the same time as the A1200, in early 1993. Several different basic versions were produced, as the machine was much more expandable and configurable than almost any of the earlier machines.
Like its smaller cousin, the A1200, the 4000 model was fitted with the AGA chipset, giving it much more power than the earlier machines, as was also fitted with the latest version of the ROM, Kickstart 3.0. The 'standard' A4000 was fitted with a 33MHz 68040, though a later version was produced with a 25MHz 68030 to cut costs.
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The Commodore Amiga was the last main project of the now defunct Commodore company, originally designed in 1985.
After Commodore went into liquidation in 1994, it seemed that the Amiga technology was dead. However, 1999 saw the advent of Workbench 3.5, the first update for 5 years, and this was followed up by version 3.9. The Amiga name and rights to technology were bought back off those who bought it from Commodore at the time of their collapse, and is now owned by Amiga Inc. ( www.amiga.com ).
There is a version 4.0 of the operating system being developed, as well as the main bulk of Amiga technology being retrofitted and redesigned, primarily for embedded devices.
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The first Amiga, the A1000, was released in 1985, featuring an 8MHz Motorola M68000 processor (approximately equivalent in processing terms to a 12MHz 286) with 256K of RAM. It's main features of the day, though, were its capability to display 4,096 simultaneous colours on the screen, something no other home machine at the time could do, and play sound in four simultaneous channels, two on the left, and two on the right.
In 1987, the A2000 and the A500 were released, the two main Amigas for the desktop, though the A2000 was definitely more of a power machine - it had more RAM and more expansion potential than the A500, but was less compatible with games, for exactly that reason. The A500, though, was the mainstay of the Amiga stable, for some years, until the release of the less-than-popular A500 Plus and its bigger brother, the A3000, both featuring the new version of the operating system, Workbench 2.0, with dire consequences for software compatibility.
In early 1992, Commodore released the A600, a kind of 'cut-down' A500 Plus, missing the number keypad on the right-hand side of the machine. Late 1992 saw the advent of the A1200 and its bigger cousin, the A4000. These machines sported the all-new "AGA" custom chip-set, capable of displaying 256 colours on-screen natively, instead of the original method of trickery involving palette-shifting, though capable of displayng 262,144 colours on-screen with palette-shifting techniques, as well as more simultaneous voices through the sound system.
It also featured Workbench 3.0 and late 1993 saw the release of Workbench 3.1, an update featuring support for features like native CD-ROM support.
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From it's launch in 1987, marketed as a games machine, the A500 was an amazing success for Commodore, which revived the ailing sales of its hardware. Like all the home-level machines, it was equipped with a 7.14MHz Motorola 68000 processor, and the 'custom chipset' which made it famous for its capabilities.
At the time, it was the only domestically-priced machine capable of displaying up to 4,096 colours on a display simultaneously, and was also capable of managing a 8-bit 4-track audio output at 22KHz. By today's standards, quite inferior (being half the quality and half the clarity of modern CDs) but several bands launched into marginal success with an Amiga or two.
Of these, there are the Chemical Brothers, Nation XII, Urban Shakedown, and a Belgian band named Front 242. The Chemical Brothers are still famous today, though the rest have disappeared into relative obscurity. Nation XII were the most famous at the time, producing the music for the hit game Gods, a song titled 'Into The Wonderful', all produced using an Amiga and its amazing chipset, far beyond anything else at the time.
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