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AMIGA 4000

In 1992 Commodore launched the most advanced Amiga yet. The A4000 used the AGA chipset to allow it to show 256,000 colours on screen from a palette of 16.8 million, as well as the new Workbench 3 that introduced the concept of among other things, datatypes. The Amiga 4000 is one of the most powerful Amigas ever made.

As a replacement for the A3000 & A3000T, the A4000 was a combination of the A2000 (big box), A3000 (vertical slots (integrated hard drive controller) and A1200 (AGA chips). As standard it allows memory expansion for up to 18Mb RAM on the motherboard. It shipped with either a 25 MHz 68030/68882 or 25 MHz 68040 CPU. The A4000 was never intended for release, but was a prototype for a system known as the A3000 Plus which was a considerably better machine. The machine was eventually cancelled and the A4000 drafted for release due to the low cost of development.

Like the Amiga 3000, the 4000 has 2 MB of chip RAM (reserved for its coprocessors) and 4 MB of fast RAM (used directly by the 68040).

The Amiga 4000 mainboard was planned to use the AAA chip (the video custom chip designed to replace the AGA chip), the AAA chip was theoretically designed to use 8 MB FastRAM (see the "Chip RAM : ON=2MB, OFF=8MB" jumper on the motherboard), unfortunately, Commodore didn't use this chip, so this jumper is absolutely useless.

There's an internal 120 MB IDE hard disk and 4 expansion slots: three ISA slots (for PC compatible cards) and one dedicated 32 bit video slot used for graphics cards.

The Amiga 4000 works under WorKBench 3.0, a very powerful and flexible multitasking system which looks like UNIX, it can read & write directly to DOS 1.44 Mb floppy disks.

The Amiga 4000 was mainly used for video production but was in direct competition with the PC compatibles when most of its major products (ImageIn, Real 3D, & Lightwave, to name a few) were adapted for Windows.

There were in fact two models of Amiga 4000 :
- the A4000-040 released in September 92 with a Motorola 68040 Processor, 6 Mb RAM, internal 3.5" 1.76 Mb Floppy Drive and 120 Mb IDE Hard Drive,
- and the A4000-030 released March 93, with Motorola 25MHz 68030EC processor, 4Mb RAM (2Mb Chip, 2Mb Fast), 3.5" FDD, 120Mb hard disk, etc.

There was even a more powerful successor called Amiga 4000T ("T" stands for Tower). The A4000T is basically an A4000 in a full tower case with IDE & SCSI-2 Fast controllers integrated as well as 2 video slots and shipped with a 25MHz 68040 processor.

A lot of expansion hardware has been developed for the 4000/1200 : Video cards (2000 x 1500 in 24 bit), 3D cards, Wide SCSI controllers and PowerPC 604e/233 MHz accelerator cards.

The Amiga scene is still very active and great software is still being developed.

Source : Amiga Interactive Guide.

Todd Deery reports:
There was at least one other version of the Amiga 4000 available (at least in Canada) -- the Amiga 4000LC. This version contained the 25Mhz LC version of the 68040, which lacked a math coprocessor.

from Chris Coulson:
Here in the UK, the 4000-030 (not sure if this is true for the -040 as well) was also available with an 80MB HD in place of the 120MB drive.