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footswitch pencil to the A1200 A1205A... ambercity.com |
For the Motorola mobile phone, see Motorola MING A1200i.
The Amiga 1200, or A1200, was Commodore International's third-generation Amiga computer, aimed at the home market. It was launched on 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 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]
[edit] PopularityAlthough 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 Commodore never released any official sales figures, Commodore Frankfurt gave a figure of 95 thousand Amiga 1200 systems sold in Germany.[4] [edit] Technical information[edit] Processor and RAMThe 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. [edit] Graphics and soundThe 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. [edit] Peripherals and expansionThe 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. [edit] Operating SystemThe 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. [edit] Specifications
[edit] Advantages over the low-cost Amiga 600
[edit] Bundled SoftwareSoftware 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). [edit] Trivia
[edit] See also[edit] References
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