Amiga 4000 - Vintage Hardware
Commodore's 32-bit Amigas: The Amiga 4000
Date Range: 1992 - 1994
Release Price: Not released
This was to the next Amiga after the A3000 that was to offer a few advances. However, instead of releasing the machine as the A3500, Commodore changed the name to the Amiga 3500T.
At the time of release, Commodore engineers were working on the A3000+, which would offer many significant enhancements over the A3000.
Commodore cut the project due to costs and focused on a lesser machine, the A4000D.
A4000 Product Specs:
- 32 bit 68030/68040 cpu
- 25Mhz
- 100MB SCSI HD
- 1280 x 400 video
- 80 x 32 text
- 16 million colours
- 8-bit stereo
- 4MB Fast RAM
- 2MB Chip RAM
- 3.5 1.76MB floppy
- 4 Zorro III slots
- Pre-emptive Multitasking
Commodore-Amiga 4000
 In 1992, Commodore-Amiga released the 4000. It featured the AGA chipset allowing it to display 256,000 colours on screen from a palette of 16.8 million. The Amiga 4000 came with Commodore's new operating system, version 3.0, which introduced the concept of datatypes.
Several variants were available, all fitted with 6MB RAM, 1.76mb High-Density disk drive and an internal hard drive as standard. However, while considered to be an upgrade by Commodore, many users felt the Amiga 4000 was a downgrade from the Amiga 3000.
Commodore fixed these issues by releasing the Amiga 4000 tower, which was the most advanced Amiga ever. It offered either SCSI or IDE drives and was considered much faster.
The Amiga 4000 was intended as a replacement for the A3000 & A3000T. It featured a big box like the Amiga 2000, which made it perfect for the video industry as the A3000 could not fit many of the expansion boards required to run video. The A4000, like the A3000, offered memory expansion up to 18MB -- a huge amount for that time period.
The A3000+ or AA3000 machine was eventually cancelled and the A4000 drafted for release due to the low cost of development. Many ex-Commodore engineers, Dave Haynie being the most notable, have never forgiven this marketing blunder that replaced a machine that corrected many of the Amigas failings with one based around an extremely flawed design.
The 4000, while a faster machine, had significantly slower drive access times compared to the A3000. Another flaw was the use of PC memory, which was about 50% slower than the A3000. However, a year later, Commodore released the A4000T that offered both SCSI and IDE, but still used the slower PC memory.
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