A1200
|
|
Amiga_1200_with_mouse,_drives.jpg
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.
Like its predecessor, the A500, it featured an all-in-one design incorporating the CPU, keyboard, and disk drives in one physical unit. It shipped with 2 MB of memory, Commodore's third-generation chipset, AGA; and AmigaOS 3.0. It utilized a Motorola MC68EC020 CISC CPU (a 68020 with 24bit addressing) running at 14.28 MHz. For expansion, the A1200 featured a memory/CPU slot and a PCMCIA slot.
Because the unit's memory was shared between the CPU and the sound and video chips, expanding memory beyond 2 MB greatly increased the A1200's speed. Various third-party accelerators featuring 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060 and later PowerPC processors quickly became available to increase the computer's speed further.
Unlike the A500 and A600, which were only incremental upgrades over the original A1000 released in 1985, the A1200 was a significant upgrade, featuring more than four times the processing power and greatly enhanced graphics capabilities. However, the A1200 proved not to be as popular as the A500. Although its graphics capabilities stood up well in comparison to the Intel 80386 and 486-based IBM PC compatibles it competed against, many PC clones had more processing power and a lower price, in addition to a larger software library. The Amiga's custom chips were simply more expensive to produce than the commodity chips utilized in PCs, which drove up the A1200's price. In addition, fewer retailers carried the A1200 than earlier Commodore computers, especially in the United States. 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.
The A1200 was re-launched in 1995 after the Amiga assets were sold to Escom, but the new units were priced at 1992 levels and experienced compatibility problems. As of 2003, the A1200 is still being sold by Amiga, Inc., the fourth company to own the rights to the machine.
| List of Commodore microcomputers |
|
MOS Technology 6502-based (8-bit): MOS/CBM KIM-1 |
PET/CBM |
CBM-II (aka B/P series) |
VIC-20/VC-20 |
C64 |
SX-64 |
C16 & 116 |
Plus/4 |
C128 |