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Amiga A3000

ByKevin Simon

Jul 1, 2013

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a3000

The A3000 is a powerhouse in comparison to previous Amiga, it was sold as a high-end graphics workstation. For a time it was used by W Industries as the basis of their highly acclaimed Virtuality machines. At the heart of the A3000 was the powerful 68030 (described in ST/Amiga Format as a ‘mainframe on a chip’). In addition the A3000 was the first Amiga to feature the new Kickstart 2 upgrade and Zorro III slots.

To emphasis the A3000s capabilities as a high-end workstation, two operating systems were included:
The first was the newly released Kickstart/Workbench 2. This was unusual by the fact that Kickstart was stored on the hard disk rather than in ROM. This was similar to the A1000 that required Kickstart to be loaded from floppy disk before anything else could be done.

The second OS to be included with the A3000 was the Unix System (SVR4) V operating system. This allowed the use of the Unix graphical interface, X Windows and Open Look. It also came with standard networking capabilities (probably a first for Commodore), such as TCP/IP, NFS and RFS for networking between different operating systems. In a bizarre twist, the Unix OS was sold on a magnetic tape rather than floppy disk.

spec1

CPU 68030 at 16 or 25 Mhz
FPU 68881-16Mhz or 68882-25Mhz
Custom Chips Denise – 8373 SuperDenise
Paula
Agnus – 8372B Agnus for 2 meg CHIP RAM
Fat Gary
Amber – De-interlacing chip to provide 31KHz video
SuperBuster -07, -09 and -11
SuperDMAC -02, -04
Ramsey -04 and -07
Video ECS (4096 colors)
Kickstart 1.3 and 2.04
Memory 1-2Mb Chip RAM, up to 16M FAST (Zip)
Drives: Internal 880K floppy
SCSI-2 Hard drive
Slots 1 – Video
1 – CPU
4 – Zorro III
2 – 16 bit ISA in line with Zorro III slots
Ports Mouse
Joystick
Parallel
Serial
15Khz RGB video
31Khz RGB video (Flicker fixer)
External Floppy
External SCSI-2 Connector
5-pin DIN Keyboard connector
Stereo RCA Audio jacks
Black & White composite video output

 

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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