A1200 Amiga Definition

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. It had a failure rate under warranty of 0.78%, much better than the A500's rate of 8.25%.

A1200 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 it had in earlier times.
• The Amiga's custom chips cost more to produce than the commodity chips utilized in PCs, making the A1200 more expensive, relative to PCs, than 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.

A1200 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 MiB of memory.

It shipped with 2 MiB of Chip RAM. Chip RAM could not be expanded beyond those 2 MiB, but an additional 8 MiB 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 MiB on two 128 MiB SIMMs), real time clocks, IDE ports and other enhancements.

A1200 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 rates for sound playback.

A1200 Peripherals and Expansion

In addition to the ports common to 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 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 the much more powerful A500 power supply.

A1200 Software

The first incarnation of the A1200 was bundled with AmigaOS 3.0.

Technical Specifications Summary

• CPU: Motorola 68EC020 (14.32 MHz NTSC, 14.18 MHz PAL).
• Chipset: AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture)
  • Audio (Paula):
    • 4 voices / 2 channels (Stereo)
    • 8-bit resolution / 6-bit volume
    • 28/56 kHz maximum sampling rate (depending on video mode)
    • 70 dB S/N Ratio
  • Video:
    • 24-Bit palette (16.7 Million colors)
    • 256 Simultaneous colors (More with HAM-8)
    • Resolutions ranging from 320×200 to 1280×512i
• Memory:
  • 512 KiB ROM for Kickstart code.
  • 2 MiB of Chip RAM
  • Up to 8 MiB of Fast RAM in the expansion slot.
• Removable Storage:
  • 3.5" DD Floppy drive, capacity 880 KiB.
• 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 × Game/Joy ports (DE9)
  • RS232 Serial port
  • Centronics Parallel port (DB25)
  • Port for external floppy drive (DB23)
  • 16-bit Type II PCMCIA slot
  • 150 pin local expansion port (trapdoor)
  • Clockport
• Other characteristics
  • Weight: 8 lb.
  • Size: 9.5" deep × 18.5" wide × 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)

A1200 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.) [1]
• 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 would expect on, say, an IBM PC.

References

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