Commodore Amiga 1200

Friend 1200 with two external floppy units.

The Amiga 1200, or A1200, is part of the third generation of Commodore Amiga computers, focused on the home market. It was released in October 1992 at a price of £399 in the UK and $599 in the US.

After the bankruptcy of Commodore International, the rights to the Amiga were sold separately from the rest of the brand, being acquired by Escom who relaunched it in 1995. The new Escom A1200 comes equipped with Kickstart V40.63 (3.1), and its price is similar to those of 1992.

Like its predecessor the Commodore Amiga 500, it comes in an all-in-one design incorporating the motherboard with CPU, floppy drives, and optionally a 2.5" IDE hard drive, in a box with the built-in keyboard on top.

Popularity

Although it is a significant improvement the A1200 does not become as popular as the Amiga 500. There are several reasons for this:

• Although their graphic capabilities are high compared to the competition, Amiga will no longer lead this field, which passes to the PCs.
• Amiga's proprietary chipset (AGA) is more expensive to produce than the chips used on the PC, making the A1200 relatively more expensive than the PCs, in contrast to the situation when the Commodore Amiga 1000 and Commodore Amiga 500.
• Few distributors marketed the A1200, especially in the United States.
• The Amiga 1200 received bad press because it was incompatible with several Amiga 500 games.

Commodore never provided official sales data, but it is estimated that Commodore shipped close to 1 million A1200s worldwide before its bankruptcy in April 1994.

Technical Information

Processor and RAM

The A1200 uses a CISC Motorola MC68EC020 CPU (about four times faster than the Motorola 68000 microprocessor in the Amiga 500). It is notable that like the 68000, the 68EC020 has a 24-bit expansion bus, which limits directly addressable memory to a maximum of 16 Megabytes, without resorting to memory banking techniques.

It comes standard with 2 MB of CHIP RAM. The Chip RAM cannot be greater than those 2 MB, so an internal memory expansion of 8 MB of Fast RAM can be added through the lower hatch slot.

Subsequently, several third party accelerators incorporated 68020, 68030, 68040, 68060 and PowerPC processors. These accelerator cards not only have faster CPUs but more and faster memory (in the most expensive ones, 256 MB on 2 x 128 MB SIMMs), real time clock, additional and improved IDE ports and other improvements.

Sound and Graphics

The A1200 comes with the third generation Amiga chipset, the Advanced Graphics Architecture or AGA. As the name indicates, the AGA chipset has superior graphic capabilities than the previous ones, but little else.

The A1200 also offers enhanced audio capabilities allowing for higher sampling when sample-to-play sound.

Peripherals and Expansion

In addition to the ports that can be found on earlier Amigas the A1200 features a memory/CPU slot, a PCMCIA-1 slot and also something unique to the A1200 - a clock port. This port is a remnant of an abandoned feature in the design phase (real time clock and Chip RAM expansion) and is used by, among other things, sound cards, I/O interfaces, O(I/O) and later, USB interfaces.

The A1200 benefited from a good part of the peripherals and extensions of the Amiga family as well as some specific to the A1200. The most common were the external floppy drive, MIDI interfaces, audio or video scanning interfaces, memory extensions, accelerator cards, internal 2.5" hard drive, external CD-ROM and SCSI/IDE controllers..

If you were not willing to give up the expansion possibilities provided by the PCI and Zorro III buses, you could add them to the A1200, allowing you to use graphics, sound or network cards on either of the two buses, although always at cost of giving up the all-in-one format of the A1200. Eyetech and Power Computing build and distribute various kits to include the A1200 motherboard in a PC tower case, even allowing the use of PC AT keyboards instead of the hard-to-find Amiga.

Of them, the most renowned was Syamese: in the same remodeled tower case, a Super Socket 7 board with a Pentium MMX or an AMD K6-2 is fixed on one side and on the other (the normally open one to access the cards) the motherboard of an A1200 on a pivoting frame. Both boards communicate over the SCSI bus through cards, a cable and a special software that opens an Amiga window on the Windows desktop and a Windows window on the Amiga Workbench, allowing cut and paste between the two. IDE drives can be shared as if they were on the Network, while the entire SCSI bus is shared by both computers.

One problematic factor in upscaling the A1200 is that its power supply is limited to 23 watts. Hard drives and even external floppy disks force the source too much. This is solved in three ways: using a Tower case, using an Amiga 500 font or replacing the font with a PC adapted font. The latter was done both at an amateur and commercial level, highlighting since the days of the Amiga 500 the Goliath, a 200-watt AT source (like those used then in the towers).

Software

Commodore's A1200 came with AmigaOS 3.0 using Kickstart 3.0 (39,106), CrossDOS (allowing you to read and write MS-DOS-formatted disks), various utilities including calculator and screen saver, and limited-time packages with Deluxe Paint IV AGA (2D graphics editor and animation program) and Final Copy (a complete word processor).

The Amiga Technologies/Escom 1200 came with AmigaOS 3.1 and Kickstart 3.1, and various software package offerings were introduced, such as Scala, Wordworth and so on.

Summary

• CPU: Motorola MC68EC020 to 14.32 MHz (NTSC) or 14.18 MHz (PAL)
• Chipset: AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)
  • Audio (Paula):
    • 4 voices / 2 channels (Stereo)
    • 8-bits resolution / 6-bits volume
    • Sample frequency of 28 kHz (normal), 56 kHz (Productivity Mode)
    • 70 dB S/N Ratio
  • Video (Lisa):
    • 24-bit palette (16.7 million colors)
    • 256 simultaneous colors (262'144 in HAM-8)
    • Resolution range from 320x200 to 1280x512i (linked)
• Memory:
  • 512 KiB of ROM for Kickstart code
  • 2 MiB of CHIP RAM
  • Up to 8 Fast RAM MiB in expansion slot
  • Up to 256 Fast RAM MiB with Accelerating Cards
• Removable storage:
  • 3.5" Double Density floppy unit, with capacity of 880 KiB
• Internal storage:
  • Hard Drive Emplacement 2.5" (IDE PIO-0 Controller)
• Input/output connectors:
  • Video output composite TV (PAL in the versions sold in Europe, Australia and part of Asia, NTSC the rest)
  • Analog RGB video connector at 15 kHz (DB-23)
  • Connectors RCA stereo audio
  • 2 Joystick/mouse connectors (DE-9)
  • RS-232 serial port (DB-25)
  • Centronics parallel printer port (DB-25)
  • External disk drive port (DB-23)
  • Port PCMCIA Type II of 16-bits
  • Local expansion port of 150 pins (lower door)
  • 22 pin port for internal clock
• Other features
  • External power supply 23W, 220-240V/50Hz(PAL), 110V/60Hz(NTSC)
  • Weight: 8 pounds (3.6Kg)
  • Size: 9.5" deep x 18.5" wide x 3" high (250 x 490 x 70 mm)
  • Standard keyboard Amiga QWERTY/QWERTZ/AZERTY integrated with 96 keys (including 19 function keys and numerical keypad)
• Software (including):
  • AmigaOS 3.0-3.1 operating system. (Kickstart 3.0-3.1/Workbench 3.0-3.1)

Advantages over the Amiga 600

• 24-bit palette (12-bits at Commodore Amiga 600)
• HAM-8 and 256 colors (8-bits)
• Numerical Keypad
• Faster CPU
• Expansion port and watch port
• You can run AGA apps

Anecdote

• The Escom A1200 come with High Density PC floppy disks as internal units, which have been reduced to Double Density. the result is that some software does not work, because these drives do not provide the "ready" signal, which indicates if there is a floppy in the drive.
• The A1200 survived his short life, despite being an over-the-counter domestic computer, thanks to the expansions of third parties, launched even after his disappearance of the stores, which held him a time at the level of the Mac PowerPC.
• Because internal memory should be shared with the chipset and CPU, arriving the chipset to have greater priority, it is called RAM only directionable by the CPU "Fast RAM", so enlargement is to put the A1200 to the level of PC compatible in speed.