In October 1992 the Amiga 1200 was launched. This machine took the A500 approach to computing with the "distinct" Commodore case, but including the AGA chipset present in the A4000, 2 MB RAM, and the PCMCIA slot from the A600.
At the price of £399 it sold like hot cakes and is seen as one of the best Amigas to date. It appears to have been rushed to launch for the Christmas period with manuals claiming to give you the opportunity to upgrade from 1mb to 2mb chip ram with FPU. It is, however, a darn fine machine that can be easily upgraded for most of your needs.
After Escom bought the Amiga during 1995 it was relaunched to mass outrage. The machine still cost £399, £150 more than it had done a year previously and was not enhanced in any dramatic fashion. It was released in two versions- the Amiga Magic pack and the Amiga Surfer bundle. Unfortunately, the former was never released due to Escoms financial situation. The Escom Amigas were also struck by incompatibility problems due to a different disk drive being used, it was actually a PC high-density drive mechanism that had been altered to allow compatibility with the Amiga file system. Unfortunately, some games that hit the hardware directly would not run. A circuit upgrade was released free of charge that allowed users to fix the drive problem.
More information from Chris Green:
We got our A1200 in about 1995.It was part of a part exchange deal I think from Escom. You had to bring in an old A500 and then you got the A1200 for £199. I think it was the Magic pack (it had a spaceman on the box).
The hard drives you could add were internal 2.5" drives as the 3.5" were too big for the case. You could also add any amount of external floppy drives, we had 2.
We had a Reno 2X cd rom which fitted onto an SCSI adapter. You could also have an ATAPI-IDE drive if you threaded the IDE cable out the back of the case.
View our 3D model of this computer, modeled by Marco Chrappan !
NAME
Amiga 1200
MANUFACTURER
Commodore
TYPE
Home Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
October 1992
END OF PRODUCTION
1996
KEYBOARD
built-in keyboard, 96 keys
CPU
Motorola MC68EC020 + MC68881 FPU
SPEED
14.18758 MHz (PAL) 14.31818 MHz (NTSC)
CO-PROCESSOR
AGA based chipset: 8374 Alice (memory controller and blitter), 4203 Lisa (video control chip), 8364 Paula (sound & I/O), Gayle (I/O, IDE interface), 391425 Budgie (bus controller)
RAM
2 MB Chip RAM, expandable to 10 MB max (2 MB Chip RAM + 8 MB Fast Ram)
ROM
Kickstart 3.1: 512 KB
GRAPHIC MODES
320x200 to 1280x512 max
COLORS
Palette: 16.7 million On screen: 256 in normal modes, 262144 in HAM-8
SOUND
4 channel 8 bit PCM, stereo output
SIZE / WEIGHT
9.5" deep × 18.5" wide × 3" high / 8 lbs 25cm deep x 49cm wide x 7cm high / 3.1 Kg
I/O PORTS
RS-232 serial port, Centronics parallel port, external disk interface, 150 pin local expansion port, Clockport, 2x RCA audio, PCMCIA/JEIDA card interface, IDE hard drive interface, composite video out, RF out, 2x Atari joystick/mouse ports
