Amiga 2000 - Vintage Hardware
Commodore's 16-bit Amigas: The Amiga 2000
Date Range: 1987 - 1991
Release Price: US$1,500.00
The Amiga 2000 came in several different variations:
- Amiga 1500
- Amiga 2000HD
- Amiga 2500
- Amiga 2500HD
The A2500 included the Commodore A2630 or A2630, which were processor accelerators including the 68020 or the 68030. The HD designation meant that a Hard Drive was included.
The Amiga 1500 was a Commodore UK designation. It offered two 3.5 floppy drives instead of one.
Product Specs:
- 16/32 bit 68000 cpu
- 7.15MHz
- 640 x 400 video
- 4096 colours
- 4 voices, 2 channel stereo
- 512KB RAM (A,B)
- 256KB ROM (A,B)
- 512KB ROM (C)
- 1M Chip RAM (C)
- 3.5 880KB floppy
- Pre-emptive Multitasking
Commodore-Amiga 2000
 In 1987, Commodore-Amiga released the Amiga A2000 at the same time it released the Amiga 500. The Amiga 2000 was designed to be a high-end machine perfect for video work. With five native (Zorro II) slots and two 16-bit ISA slots for IBM AT/XT compatibility it offered expandability like no other Amiga. And with a CPU and video slot, the Amiga 2000 could be expanded with the same level of performance of any Amiga 3000 or 4000.
Aside from the internal expansion, the A2000 is identical to the A500 with only a few minor distinctions:
- The A2000 comes with its own battery for CMOS and clock info.
- The A2000 had a separate keyboard
Graphics and performance saw no major improvements, other than support for the extra half-brite mode. What did allow the A2000 to take off in sales was the released of the Newtek Video Toaster. With the Toaster, the A2000 scaled to become a powerful video editing station or a CGI rendering workstation. While slow in today's standards, it was extremely fast in the late 1980s when processor upgrades were added.
So successful and powerful was the Toaster that entire shows like Babylon 5 and RoboCop used the Amiga for their CGI effects.
In 1991, Commodore offered a slightly improved revision C. It featured two new video modes and Amiga OS 2.04. The new video modes included:
- 640 x 480 (productivity)
- 800 x 600 (super 72)
|
