Sothius' Home of Ancient Microcomputers - Amiga 1200 (ASSY 364718 REV.1D1)

Amiga 1200

Amiga 1200 (68 KBytes)

The Amiga 1200, which looks like an A600 with numeric keypad, and was the entry-level counterpart to the A4000. Behind it, however, you can see part of the CBM 1084S-D2 monitor, the AmigaDOS 3.0 system disks and manuals. The integrated drive is on its right side
(picture copyright by M.A.Grundke)

Specifications

Name
Amiga 1200
machines with pre-equipped harddisk were labeled A1200HD

Codenames
'Channel-Z', which is a song by The B52's (from their album Cosmic Thing)
Amiga 800/ Amiga 900 while in early development

Made by
Commodore AMIGA Inc.
after Commodore was liquidated, it was produced by AMIGA Technologies (owned by ESCOM) for a while ('AMIGA Technologies A1200')

Released 1992

Serial-No. MODEL A1200 ID-NO.530311
A1200 GR 8510693365067002008585

Board-info
CHANNEL Z
A1200 REV 1D1
C= COMMODORE ELECTRONICS LTD.
(C) COPYRIGHT 1992 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
GR/BF/EG/CG/TC/DF/DF/FISH NINES
HMC/LW/CW/GUAY/CW/DUNN/JOEP/JH
ICDES/ICLAYOUT/HK/P.A./Q.A./CATS/DOC./SOFTWARE
FCC ID BR9530311
SCH 364717
ASSY 364716
FAB 364719
AWK 364720-04

the A1200's board (like the A600's before) is build in SMD technology (surface mounted devices), meaning that all chips are soldered directly to the board. That technique reduces production cost and failures due to oxidized sockets, but makes part replacement more difficult
also see the mainboard overview and A1200 LED PCB

CPU Motorola MC68EC020FG16
The MC68EC020 is a stripped-down version of the MC68020 with only 24 bit address-bus, limiting its memory-allocation capabilities to 16 MBytes
Has spare PLCC pads onboard for the use of an MC68881-FPU - although such an A1200 was never produced

Speed 14.19 MHz (PAL)/ 14.32 MHz (NTSC)

RAM CSG 8374 (CSG 391010) 'ALICE'
2048 KBytes 24 bit-ChipRAM:
4 pcs. Hitachi HM514260AJ8 (256Kx16)
up to 4 MB 32 bit-FastRAM (via expansion slot)
up to 4 MB 16 bit-FastRAM (via PCMCIA)
up to 128 MB 32 bit-FastRAM (via 3rd party MC68030/ 040/ 060 expansions)

since introduction of the Agnus 8372B, Amigas could address 2 MB ChipRAM. ALICE is the AA-chipset's 32 bit counterpart of the 8372B-compatible MOS 8375 (used in the latest ECS machines)

ROM/ Native OS C391523-01/ C391524-01 Kickstart 3.0 (v39.106, 2x256KB)
AmigaDOS 3.0
The later ESCOM-produced machines came with Kickstart 3.1 (v40.68) and AmigaDOS 3.1, which contains lots of fixes such as faster screen-handling

Keyboard/ Layout CBM 391508-01 REV 0 keyboard-MPU
96 keys/ german (QWERTZ)
compared to the Amiga 600's keyboard, the Amiga 1200's was expanded with a numeric keypad (many people complained that software making use of the numpad was hardly usable on the A600)

Graphics CSG 391227-01 'LISA'
'Blitter' (filling ops & memory block moves), integrated in ALICE
'Copper' (graphic coprocessor, supports CPU in graphic ops and controls the Blitter)
Pre-defined AA screen modes:
'LowRes': 320x256 (50Hz PAL)/ 320x200 (60Hz NTSC)
'HighRes': 640x256 (50Hz PAL)/ 640x200 (60Hz NTSC)
'SuperHighRes': 1280x256 (PAL 50Hz)/ 1280x200 (NTSC 60Hz)
'Euro36': 320x200, 640x200, 1280x200 (73Hz)
'Euro72': 640x200, 640x400 (69Hz)
'Super72': 400x300, 800x300 (71Hz)
'Productivity': 640x240, 640x480 (58Hz)
all modes can also be interlaced, doubling vertical resolution
PAL and NTSC interlace-modes are a remnant of OCS/ ECS and can be deinterlaced by AA's LISA
others freely programmable between 320x200 and 1280x960

horizontal scan rates from 15.6-31.44kHz, vertical scan rates from 48-73Hz (depending on selected resolutions. Also programmable)
Colors:
256 (8 bitplanes) from a 24 bit-palette in all resolutions
alternative color depths (depending on display mode): 5 bit (32 colors), 6 bit (64 colors) and 7 bit (128 colors)
262.144 in HAM8-mode ('Hold-and-modify' with 8 bit/pixel)
4.096 in HAM6-mode ('Hold-and-modify' with 6 bit/pixel)
Text: 60x25 or 80x25 (no 'real' text-mode, it's graphics)

Sound CSG 8364 (CSG 391077-01) 'Paula'
4 independant hardware sound channels, each including an 8 bit DAC
can be combined to 2 channels stereo
frequency- and amplitude-modulation, low-pass filter
complex sound effects can easily be programmed
Paula also has registers for floppy control

Media Panasonic JU-253-043P integrated diskdrive
3.5" disks, 880 KBytes/ disk
external drives like A1010/ A1011 via diskdrive connector
5.25" disks, 360/1200 KBytes for PC-compatibility (A1020 drive)
also possible: 3.5" 1.76MB Amiga-HD-drives (compatible with PC-HD 1.44MB)
Harddisks:
onboard AT-IDE-controller logic integrated in GAYLE (see I/O)

SCSI-disks via 3rd-party expansions
all A1200 and A600 have mountings for 2.5" harddisks
the A1200HD came pre-equipped with 2.5" harddisk

Input/ Output 2x CSG 8520PL 'CIA' (Interface I/O, timers, floppy disk I/O)
CSG 391424 'GAYLE' (PCMCIA, IDE, floppy-motor control and address decoding)
CBM 391425 'BUDGIE' for controlling bus-transfers
ADV101KP30 video D/A converter
Motorola MC1488D + MC1489D (RS232)
2x 9 pin SUB-D mouse/ joystick/ paddles
25 pin 'Centronics' parallel SUB-D
25 pin SUB-D external diskdrive
25 pin 'RS232' serial SUB-D
stereo cinch-out
23 pin SUB-D RGB jack, capable of
analog RGB (= full range of 262.144 colors)
digital RGBI (= 16 color combinations only)
monchrome composite video jack

RF-modulator (TV-out)
150 pin male edge conn. expansion-slot in its' bottom (for CPU-, RAM- and SCSI-expansions)
PCMCIA 2.0-compliant slot (same as in the A600)
onboard 2.5" IDE connector for an internal harddisk
DC-in ('square'-type)

Miscellaneous
The A1200, together with the professional A4000 (and later the 4000T, see pic below), introduced the 'AA'-chipset ('Advanced Amiga'), successor to the 'Enhanced Chip Set' used in A500 Plus, A600 and A3000. Interesting in that context is that AA was just intended to fill the gap between the (technically old) ECS-machines and the long planned 'Advanced Amiga Architecture' (AAA), which was already conceived in 1987 - mainly to the make the Amiga architecture more versatile

There was also the Amiga CD³², a game system based on the A1200 board, and the A1200HD (simply an A1200 with a harddisk pre-equipped)

The first AA-chipset prototype machine, called A3000+ (or 'AA3000'), used a modified A3000-board with the option to install a DSP (digital sound processor). However, the DSP was dropped because of the cost, and so the AA production-machines came with Paula again

Working 'AAA'-customchips did indeed exist, as we know today, on a prototype board called 'Nyx'. AAA consisted of the new customchips 'Linda' (display line buffer), 'Monica' (display controller), 'Mary' (I/O) and 'Andrea' (ChipRAM, bus control, blitter) and featured resolutions up to 1280x1024, a new HAM10-mode and a modular concept, e.g. with possibility to use two Lindas and Monicas ('dual system') or put AMIGA customchips and CPU module on easily exchangeable daughterboards. Sadly, AAA was cancelled in late development stage. In their last days before bankruptcy, Commodore concentrated on 'Hombre', a new, promising chipset built around a PA-RISC CPU (made by HP) - unfortunately, it was never finished

There are reports of an A2200 or A1200+ sold only in the USA: it is said to be an A1200 with 68030. Detailed specs are unknown - most likely it was just an A1200 which came pre-equipped with an accelerator card. However, 'A1200+' and 'A1300' were also the codenames for early Walker prototypes, an AA/ 68EC030-system built by AMIGA Technologies

'A2200' was also one of Commodore's codenames for a planned machine with E-IDE (instead of SCSI), ECS and MC68020 CPU, which was intended as an A2000 successor and never went into production (like A2400, A3200 and A3400 - the latter codenames can still be found on the A3630 CPU-board). However, the idea of cost-reduction by using IDE-devices was picked up in A600, A1200 and A4000 designs (and considered a 'step backwards' by most users)

The A1200 could have been Commodore's breakthrough in the home computer markets, taking the position of its predecessor, the well-established Amiga 500 - would it have appeared earlier, and instead of the ill-fated Amiga 600...

Amiga OS 3.0 (84 KBytes)

A screenshot of AmigaDOS 3.0, taken at 640x480 in 8 bit color ('Productivity'). Although the GUI didn't change much compared to AmigaDOS 2.x (the first thing to note is a different title bar), there are lots of 'under the hood' improvements in AmigaDOS 3, such as bugfixes, full AA-chipset support and the implementation of datatypes, creating a standard interface for various different graphics-, sound- and animation-fileformats. An example for datatypes is shown here: the default picture viewer, MultiView, can display a GIF because a corresponding datatype exists in sys:devs (shown, by the way, is an Amiga 4000T picture from a Commodore advert - the A4000's tower version was the flagship in AA-technology). Note also that the later OS versions were called 'AmigaOS' (starting with AmigaOS 3.1) - probably 'disk operating system' didn't sound professional enough...

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Sothius' Home - Museum - AMIGA - Amiga 1200 - additional pictures

Name	Amiga 1200 machines with pre-equipped harddisk were labeled A1200HD
Codenames	'Channel-Z', which is a song by The B52's (from their album Cosmic Thing) Amiga 800/ Amiga 900 while in early development
Made by	Commodore AMIGA Inc. after Commodore was liquidated, it was produced by AMIGA Technologies (owned by ESCOM) for a while ('AMIGA Technologies A1200')
Released	1992
Serial-No.	MODEL A1200 ID-NO.530311 A1200 GR 8510693365067002008585
Board-info	CHANNEL Z A1200 REV 1D1 C= COMMODORE ELECTRONICS LTD. (C) COPYRIGHT 1992 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED GR/BF/EG/CG/TC/DF/DF/FISH NINES HMC/LW/CW/GUAY/CW/DUNN/JOEP/JH ICDES/ICLAYOUT/HK/P.A./Q.A./CATS/DOC./SOFTWARE FCC ID BR9530311 SCH 364717 ASSY 364716 FAB 364719 AWK 364720-04 the A1200's board (like the A600's before) is build in SMD technology (surface mounted devices), meaning that all chips are soldered directly to the board. That technique reduces production cost and failures due to oxidized sockets, but makes part replacement more difficult also see the mainboard overview and A1200 LED PCB
CPU	Motorola MC68EC020FG16 The MC68EC020 is a stripped-down version of the MC68020 with only 24 bit address-bus, limiting its memory-allocation capabilities to 16 MBytes Has spare PLCC pads onboard for the use of an MC68881-FPU - although such an A1200 was never produced
Speed	14.19 MHz (PAL)/ 14.32 MHz (NTSC)
RAM	CSG 8374 (CSG 391010) 'ALICE' 2048 KBytes 24 bit-ChipRAM: 4 pcs. Hitachi HM514260AJ8 (256Kx16) up to 4 MB 32 bit-FastRAM (via expansion slot) up to 4 MB 16 bit-FastRAM (via PCMCIA) up to 128 MB 32 bit-FastRAM (via 3rd party MC68030/ 040/ 060 expansions) since introduction of the Agnus 8372B, Amigas could address 2 MB ChipRAM. ALICE is the AA-chipset's 32 bit counterpart of the 8372B-compatible MOS 8375 (used in the latest ECS machines)
ROM/ Native OS	C391523-01/ C391524-01 Kickstart 3.0 (v39.106, 2x256KB) AmigaDOS 3.0 The later ESCOM-produced machines came with Kickstart 3.1 (v40.68) and AmigaDOS 3.1, which contains lots of fixes such as faster screen-handling
Keyboard/ Layout	CBM 391508-01 REV 0 keyboard-MPU 96 keys/ german (QWERTZ) compared to the Amiga 600's keyboard, the Amiga 1200's was expanded with a numeric keypad (many people complained that software making use of the numpad was hardly usable on the A600)
Graphics	CSG 391227-01 'LISA' 'Blitter' (filling ops & memory block moves), integrated in ALICE 'Copper' (graphic coprocessor, supports CPU in graphic ops and controls the Blitter) Pre-defined AA screen modes: 'LowRes': 320x256 (50Hz PAL)/ 320x200 (60Hz NTSC) 'HighRes': 640x256 (50Hz PAL)/ 640x200 (60Hz NTSC) 'SuperHighRes': 1280x256 (PAL 50Hz)/ 1280x200 (NTSC 60Hz) 'Euro36': 320x200, 640x200, 1280x200 (73Hz) 'Euro72': 640x200, 640x400 (69Hz) 'Super72': 400x300, 800x300 (71Hz) 'Productivity': 640x240, 640x480 (58Hz) all modes can also be interlaced, doubling vertical resolution PAL and NTSC interlace-modes are a remnant of OCS/ ECS and can be deinterlaced by AA's LISA others freely programmable between 320x200 and 1280x960 horizontal scan rates from 15.6-31.44kHz, vertical scan rates from 48-73Hz (depending on selected resolutions. Also programmable) Colors: 256 (8 bitplanes) from a 24 bit-palette in all resolutions alternative color depths (depending on display mode): 5 bit (32 colors), 6 bit (64 colors) and 7 bit (128 colors) 262.144 in HAM8-mode ('Hold-and-modify' with 8 bit/pixel) 4.096 in HAM6-mode ('Hold-and-modify' with 6 bit/pixel) Text: 60x25 or 80x25 (no 'real' text-mode, it's graphics)
Sound	CSG 8364 (CSG 391077-01) 'Paula' 4 independant hardware sound channels, each including an 8 bit DAC can be combined to 2 channels stereo frequency- and amplitude-modulation, low-pass filter complex sound effects can easily be programmed Paula also has registers for floppy control
Media	Panasonic JU-253-043P integrated diskdrive 3.5" disks, 880 KBytes/ disk external drives like A1010/ A1011 via diskdrive connector 5.25" disks, 360/1200 KBytes for PC-compatibility (A1020 drive) also possible: 3.5" 1.76MB Amiga-HD-drives (compatible with PC-HD 1.44MB) Harddisks: onboard AT-IDE-controller logic integrated in GAYLE (see I/O) SCSI-disks via 3rd-party expansions all A1200 and A600 have mountings for 2.5" harddisks the A1200HD came pre-equipped with 2.5" harddisk
Input/ Output	2x CSG 8520PL 'CIA' (Interface I/O, timers, floppy disk I/O) CSG 391424 'GAYLE' (PCMCIA, IDE, floppy-motor control and address decoding) CBM 391425 'BUDGIE' for controlling bus-transfers ADV101KP30 video D/A converter Motorola MC1488D + MC1489D (RS232) 2x 9 pin SUB-D mouse/ joystick/ paddles 25 pin 'Centronics' parallel SUB-D 25 pin SUB-D external diskdrive 25 pin 'RS232' serial SUB-D stereo cinch-out 23 pin SUB-D RGB jack, capable of analog RGB (= full range of 262.144 colors) digital RGBI (= 16 color combinations only) monchrome composite video jack RF-modulator (TV-out) 150 pin male edge conn. expansion-slot in its' bottom (for CPU-, RAM- and SCSI-expansions) PCMCIA 2.0-compliant slot (same as in the A600) onboard 2.5" IDE connector for an internal harddisk DC-in ('square'-type)
Miscellaneous	The A1200, together with the professional A4000 (and later the 4000T, see pic below), introduced the 'AA'-chipset ('Advanced Amiga'), successor to the 'Enhanced Chip Set' used in A500 Plus, A600 and A3000. Interesting in that context is that AA was just intended to fill the gap between the (technically old) ECS-machines and the long planned 'Advanced Amiga Architecture' (AAA), which was already conceived in 1987 - mainly to the make the Amiga architecture more versatile There was also the Amiga CD³², a game system based on the A1200 board, and the A1200HD (simply an A1200 with a harddisk pre-equipped) The first AA-chipset prototype machine, called A3000+ (or 'AA3000'), used a modified A3000-board with the option to install a DSP (digital sound processor). However, the DSP was dropped because of the cost, and so the AA production-machines came with Paula again Working 'AAA'-customchips did indeed exist, as we know today, on a prototype board called 'Nyx'. AAA consisted of the new customchips 'Linda' (display line buffer), 'Monica' (display controller), 'Mary' (I/O) and 'Andrea' (ChipRAM, bus control, blitter) and featured resolutions up to 1280x1024, a new HAM10-mode and a modular concept, e.g. with possibility to use two Lindas and Monicas ('dual system') or put AMIGA customchips and CPU module on easily exchangeable daughterboards. Sadly, AAA was cancelled in late development stage. In their last days before bankruptcy, Commodore concentrated on 'Hombre', a new, promising chipset built around a PA-RISC CPU (made by HP) - unfortunately, it was never finished There are reports of an A2200 or A1200+ sold only in the USA: it is said to be an A1200 with 68030. Detailed specs are unknown - most likely it was just an A1200 which came pre-equipped with an accelerator card. However, 'A1200+' and 'A1300' were also the codenames for early Walker prototypes, an AA/ 68EC030-system built by AMIGA Technologies 'A2200' was also one of Commodore's codenames for a planned machine with E-IDE (instead of SCSI), ECS and MC68020 CPU, which was intended as an A2000 successor and never went into production (like A2400, A3200 and A3400 - the latter codenames can still be found on the A3630 CPU-board). However, the idea of cost-reduction by using IDE-devices was picked up in A600, A1200 and A4000 designs (and considered a 'step backwards' by most users) The A1200 could have been Commodore's breakthrough in the home computer markets, taking the position of its predecessor, the well-established Amiga 500 - would it have appeared earlier, and instead of the ill-fated Amiga 600...