(click on picture) |
Introduced | January 1987 |
Discontinued | ??? |
Release Price | $1500+ |
The Amiga 2000 was introduced
in January of 1987 along with the Amiga
500. The Amiga
2000 was designed to appeal to anyone who likes the Amiga
for its fast processing and superlative graphics, but who
also wants the ability to run IBM
PC software. The A2000 was actually two machines in one, it was first a Commodore computer capable of the fantastic graphics and sound with a large library of games, and second an IBM clone completely compatible with the entire DOS based software library. The engineers at Commodore built a PC ISA bus into the motherboard and integrated it into the Amiga architecture. Through the installation of what was called a Bridgeboard, (an entire PC on a plug-in board), the Amiga's Zorro II bus and the ISA bus are joined allowing the Intel processor to share the internal resources such as RAM and hard drives. The basic Amiga came with one 3.5 inch floppy drive, seven expansion slots, three drive bays, and a 200 watt power supply, all for under $1500. The keyboard and mouse/joystick ports are located on the bottom right-hand side of the front of the computer. The rear of the machine has standard PC type connectors for the RS232 serial ports and parallel printer ports. Also are connectors for connecting a Commodore RGB monitor and outputs for stereo audio. The A2000 uses a Motorola 68000 processor running at 7.14 MHz, this is a 16/32 bit processor, the same processor used in the Macintosh. Unlike the A500, the A2000 came with the built in ability to be easily upgraded to a faster processor by dropping an upgrade card into a special 86 pin processor slot inside the machine. The A2000 comes with 1MB of RAM expandable to 9 MB with an expansion card. A hard drive is added by dropping in an A2090A/ A2091 Hard Card ( a hard disk mounted on an ST 506 compatible expansion card ) or an IDE hard drive can be added using a IDE controller card. As with the A500 the Kickstart disk has been replaced by burning it into a ROM chip to speed up the boot process. The seven expansion slots extend the Amiga system's bus and provide slots for IBM ISA cards. Five of these are 100 pin Amiga Zorro II slots and two are ISA specific. However two of the 100 pin slots can be used as ISA slots bringing the total ISA slots to four. The two ISA slots were originally designed for use with the 8088/8086 processor making them 8-bit slots, but Commodore predrilled the 16-bit extenders on these slots to make it possible to add in 16-bit AT type cards. The Amiga that you see above is a basic machine with 2 extra MB of RAM added and an extra 880k 3 1/2 inch floppy drive. I purchased it at a local thrift shop as a backup for my A2000HD that is set up in my workshop. |
System Architecture | Ports | Data Storage | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Memory | Video and Graphics | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Physical Specs. | Software | Power | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
Sound | Keyboard Specs. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
System Architecture |
Memory |
|||
Microprocessor | 68000 | Standard on system board | 1 MB | |
Clock speed | 7.14 MHz | Maximum on system board | 1 MB | |
Bus type | CBM proprietary and ISA | Maximum total memory | 9 MB card | |
Data bus width | 16-bit | Memory speed and type | 120ns dynamic ram | |
Address bus width | 32-bit CBM / 8-16 ISA | System board memory socket type | ??? | |
Interrupt levels | N/A | Number of memory module sockets | ??? | |
DMA channels | N/A | Memory used on system board | ??? | |
Standard Features |
Disk Storage |
|||
ROM size | 256k | Internal disk and tape drive bays | 2-3.5 & 1-5 1/4 inch | |
Optional math coprocessor | 68881 | Standard floppy drives | 1 - 3.5 inch 880k | |
Parallel port type | yes | Optional floppy drives: | 3 internal | |
RS232C serial ports | yes | * 5 1/4 inch 360k | optional | |
Mouse ports | yes - joystick | * 5 1/4 inch 1.2MB | optional | |
UART chip used | N/A | * 3 1/2 inch 880k | standard | |
Maximum speed | N/A | * 3 1/2 inch 1.44MB | No | |
CMOS real time clock | yes | * 3 1/2 inch 2.88MB | No | |
CMOS RAM | yes | Hard disk controller included | yes | |
Video & Graphics |
Sound |
|||
Graphics Processor | Fat Agnus, Denise, Paula | Sound Interface device | ||
Screen size - Col x Rows | 80 x 25 | Sound generation | ||
Resolution - Colors/High | 4 - 640 x 200 pixels | ADSR capable | ??? | |
Resolution - Colors/Low | 256 - 320 x 200 pixels | |||
Max colors | 4096 | Programming language | ||
Sprites or Missiles | ??? | Built in language | Amiga Basic / CLI | |
Built in M L monitor | no | |||
Expansion Slots |
Keyboard Specs. |
|||
Total adapter slots | 7 | Number of keys | 95 | |
Number of 8/16/32 bit slots | 2/0/5 | Upper/lower case | yes/yes | |
Keyboard cable length | 6 foot | |||
Physical Specs. |
Environmental Specs. |
|||
* Height | inches | Operating voltage @ 60 Hz | 117 VAC | |
* Width | inches | Maximum power supplied | 200 watts | |
* Depth | inches | Power supply output - volts | N/A | |
* Weight | pounds | Power supply output - amps | N/A |