Megalextoria

The Commodore Amiga 500

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The Amiga 500 was the second and by far the most popular computer in the Amiga line. It was released about two years after the original Amiga 1000 but at a significantly lower price. When the Amiga 1000 hit the market, it retailed for $1,285. The Amiga 500 was only $699 when it arrived.

While the Amiga 500 was considered the first low-end Amiga Computer, it had most of the same abilities of the Amiga 1000 and even a few advantages. Instead of 256K like the Amiga 1000, the Amiga 500 came stock with 512K of RAM. It had the same CPU and custom graphics and sound chips as the Amiga 1000. The biggest differences between the Amiga 500 and the Amiga 1000 that preceded it were the form factor and boot method. Whereas the Amiga 1000 had a more traditional desktop design with a separate CPU/disk drive unit and keyboard with the ability to place the monitor on top of the CPU, the Amiga 500 was an all-in-one design with the keyboard built into the case as with the Commodore 64. Also, with the Amiga 1000, the core of AmigaOS (Kikstart) was booted from disk as it was still considered too buggy to include in ROM. By the time the Amiga 500 came out, this was included in ROM. Otherwise, the Amiga 500 and Amiga 1000 had pretty much the same hardware including:

CPU: Motorola 68000 @ 7.16 MHz
Graphics: Custom “Denise” chip
Sound: Custom “Paula” chip
Disk: 880k 3.5″ floppy
Ports: 2x DE9M Atari joystick ports, RS-232 serial, DB23F floppy and Centronics parallel port

Arguably, the Amiga 1000 had more room for expansion but the truth is there were tons of expansions and upgrades available for both machines. Capability wise they are virtually identical.

While there were other more expensive and expandable models (i.e. the Amiga 2000) that were popular in the professional video world and certain other places, because of its relatively low price, the Amiga 500 was the model that was most popular with hobbyists and home users. Because of its excellent graphics and sound capabilities, it made for a very good games machine. However, it’s true multi-tasking OS and available scripting language (AREXX) among other innovations made the Amiga line machines that were truly ahead of their time and it could be had at a bargain price with the Amiga 500.

The Commodore Amiga 2000

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When I had my Commodore 64, the Amiga was the computer I always dreamed of upgrading to one day. By the time I actually got around to upgrading, Commodore was almost dead and it just didn’t seem like a wise purchasing decision as I was going off to college. I bought a 486 DX2-66 instead. No regrets but I still wish I had that Amiga back in the day.

The Amiga 1000 was the original model released in 1985. It featured a 7.16 MHz Motorola 68000 processor along with 256 KB of RAM, custom chips for graphics and sound, and a custom multitasking OS called Amiga OS. It was not a cheap machine but it was an incredible value for what you got. It was succeeded two years later by two models: The Amiga 500 and the Amiga 2000. The core hardware mentioned above was still the same in both with 512 KB now being the standard amount of RAM on the Amiga 500 and 1 MB on the Amiga 2000. The Amiga 500 was by far the most popular Amiga model. It was a cost reduced all-in-one unit that was popular with home users. It had the same basic abilities as the Amiga 1000 at a much lower cost.

While the Amiga 500 was the most popular Amiga for home users, it was probably the much more expensive and expandable Amiga 2000 (in the 1988 ad above) that made the Amiga a success in the professional world, particularly for video production, editing, special effects, and other video uses. While the Amiga 2000 started with the same core hardware as the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500, it was much more expandable, containing five Zorro II expansion slots, four PC ISA slots as well as easier memory and CPU upgrade options. It also included two 3.5″ and one 5.25″ drive bay.

The Zorro II slots were designed for the Amiga and provided a buffered extension to the Motorola 68000 bus. Zorro II cards used a protocol called Autoconfig that automatically assigned resources without jumper settings. This was similar to plug-and-play with PCI cards but was developed well before that. There were a vast array of Zorro II cards (a list of nearly 300 can be found here: http://amiga.resource.cx/search.pl?intf=z2) including network controllers, digital signal processors, graphics cards, SCSI cards, memory cards, and of course the immensely popular Video Toaster for video editing and just about anything else you can think of. Various PC bridge cards with processors ranging from the 8088 to the 486 were also available. These combined with the ISA slots in the Amiga allowed it to also become an expandable PC. The best part was that you could run DOS (or Windows) programs in an Amiga OS window so you weren’t restricted to only running one or the other at the same time.

In addition to these expansion slots there was also a CPU slot used for CPU upgrades. There were two offical Commodore expansions for this slot as well as a variety of third party options. The original 68000 could be upgraded in this manner to a 68020, 68030, 68040 or even 68060. These boards often had their own RAM expansion capabilities.

The Amiga 3000 eventually succeeded the 2000 but the Amiga 2000 was on the market for four years until 1991. Several variations were available during that time including the Amiga 2000HD which included a 3.5″ SCSI hard drive and controller, the Amiga 2500 which was an Amiga 2000 with Commodore’s A2620 68020 CPU card and hard drive, the Amiga 2500/30 which was an Amiga 2000 with Commodore’s A2630 68030 CPU card and hard drive, the Amiga 2500UX which was a unix variant with a tape drive, and others.