News, Views, Reviews, Photos

Amiga A2000

ByKevin Simon

Jul 1, 2013

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Two years after the initial Amiga launch, Commodore released their replacement to the ageing Amiga 1000. The Amiga 2000 developed the ‘big box’ Amiga market that continued to divide users’ until the mid-1990s, and formed the second part of Commodore’s plans to diversify the Amiga market into high and low end systems (the low-end A500 had been launched two months previous). Like the Amiga 500, the A2000 was shipped with Kickstart/Workbench 1.2.

The machine offered several advantages over the Amiga 1000 and 500:
Seven internal expansion slots (5x 100 pin Amiga Zorro II and 2 x 16-bit ISA slots). The ISA slots were disabled by default (only power and ground pins activated), but could be used when a Commodore bridgeboard was installed (a PC-on-a-card). Inactive slots can be used for non intelligent cards like TBCs or fan cards.
One megabyte memory as standard (expandable to 9MB).
The CPU could be upgraded through the purchase of a processor card and attaching it to a 86 pin processor slot.
The initial release was unpopular among several Amiga developers, including the original Amiga Los Gatos team. In an attempt to address many of these complaints, Commodore produced two major updates and numerous revisions to the A2000 design during the 1987 – 1990 time period.

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CPU 68000@7.14 Mhz
Custom Chips Denise – 8362 Denise, REV6.3+ had 8373 SuperDenise
Paula
Fat Agnus
Gary
Buster ZorroII Buster DIP
Video OCS or ECS (4096 colors)
Kickstarts 1.2, 1.3 then 2.04
Memory Memory varied according to the hardware revision.
The 3.x revisions found in German models use 512Kb Chip RAM on their motherboard and 512Kb Fast RAM on a processor card.

Revision 4.x, the American edition, had both 512Kb Chip and Fast RAM soldered onto the motherboard.

Later versions of the B2000 and C2000 based upon revision 6.x design included 1 Mb Chip RAM.
Drives Internal 880K floppy
SCSI HD in 2000HD models
Drive bays 2x 3.5″ front bays
1x 5.25″ front bay
(in the A1500 model both of the 3.5″ bays are occupied with 880Kb DD floppy disk drives.)
Slots 1 – Video
1 – CPU
5 – Zorro II
2 – 8 bit ISA
2 – 16 bit ISA in line with Zorro II slots
Interfaces 1x Serial DB25 male, RS232
1x Internal serial 26 pin header
1x Parallel DB25 female, Centronics
1x Video DB23 male, analog RGB
1x Composite, black & white
2x Mouse/game DB9 male
2x Stereo audio RCA jack
1x Keyboard 5 pin DIN female
1x External floppy DB23 female
1x Internal floppy 34 pin header

 

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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