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Amiga A1200

ByKevin Simon

Jul 1, 2013

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a1200_title

a1200

In October 1992 the A1200 was launched. This took the A500 approach to computing with the “distinct” Commodore case, but including the AGA chipset present in the A4000, 2mb ram, and the PCMCIA slot from the A600.

At the price of £399 it sold like hot cakes and is seen as one of the best Amigas to date. It appears to have been rushed to launch for the Christmas period with manuals claiming to give you the opportunity to upgrade from 1mb to 2mb chip ram with FPU. It is however, a darn fine machine that can be easily upgraded for most of your needs.

After Escom bought the Amiga during 1995 it was relaunched to mass outrage. The machine still cost £399, £150 more than it had a year previously and was not enhanced in any dramatic fashion. It was released in two versions- the Amiga Magic pack and the Amiga Surfer bundle. Unfortunately, the former was never released due to Escoms financial situation. The Escom Amigas were also struck by incompatibility problems due to a different disk drive being used, it was actually a PC high-density drive mechanism that had been altered to allow compatibility with the Amiga filesystem. Unfortunately, some games that hit the hardware directly would not run. A circuit upgrade was released free of charge that allowed users to fix the drive problem.

spec1

Motorola MC68EC020 14.32 MHz CPU
2 megabytes Chip RAM on motherboard
Maximum 2 megabytes Chip RAM
Maximum 8 megabytes Fast RAM
512k ROM on motherboard
3.5 drive bays
2.5 drive mountable
3.5 880k internal floppy drive
2.5 40 megabyte IDE hard drive (optional)
Integrated keyboard
96 keys
10 function keys
Numeric keypad
Cursor keys (inverted T layout)
2 button mouse
A1200 trapdoor 150 pin local bus expansion
PCMCIA 2.0 expansion bus
Compact case
External power supply port
External floppy drive port
RS-232 serial port
Centronics parallel port
2 mouse/joystick ports
Colour composite video port
15kHz colour RGB analogue video port
31KHz SVGA video output
2 stereo audio output ports
32 BIT data path
24 BIT address space
Optional battery backed clock
Weight: 8 lbs.
9.5″ deep x 18.5″ wide x 3 high
110 volt/60Hz 23 watts power supply (external)

 

By Kevin Simon

I run this blog & also self employed cleaning out fish ponds, but due to spinal problems not able to do as much, now started a youtube channel showing my converted Peugeot Partner micro camper also as interest in photography so now vlog about the trips and of course Lego figures out in the wild photos.

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