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The Almost Forgotten Story of the Amiga 2000
polyp2000 writes Many don't realize the impact the much forgotten Amiga 2000 had on the world. This lovely article is an informative and lighthearted read, especially if you are interested in the world of CG. "Unfortunately, The Amiga 2000 is one of the least favorite or collectible Amigas. Even today, with the most "die hard" Amiga fans, the A2000 often is ignored and shunned as a 'big, ugly' tank of a machine. One look at eBay (Canada or the U.S.), on any given day, and you can see that the A2000 often doesn't sell at all, and most times goes for a lot cheaper than all the other Amigas — even cheaper than an A500. But, because of this, one can find awesome deals, because, most of the time, the seller has no clue about what Zorro cards are inside, and for next to nothing, you can pick up a fully loaded A2000 with an '030 or above for peanuts."
But unless it comes packed with a video card and an accelerator, there's not much point to even messing with it today. What you really want if you don't actually care about Amigas is a CDTV and/or CD32, which takes up minimal space, looks minimally crappy, and runs most of the respective software library depending on whether you want the old or newer chipset.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
which is the primary reason why not to buy one. The zoro cards, especially ethernet can be hard to come by, so unless you get a loaded one... well it's pointless.
I've also had issues with bus noise by maxing out a 2000 with a bridge board, 2065, 68038 upgrade, and ram card. It really was incredibly unstable.
The 2000 has the same CPU as the 500, and 1000. It really was a pointless model. The 3000 and 3000T's are much nicer. And I should add the even a bare 3000 is far more stabler than a loaded 2000.
The other issue now is WinUAE is so good, it can run BSD, AMIX, along with all the software from the Amiga heyday. Considering how funky old machines can be, why even bother?
Actually, the accelerator and the genlock slot are both special-purpose slots.
What you really want to find inside of your Amiga 2000 is an '030 accelerator and an Emplant board with some Mac IIci roms on it, as well as a boatload of RAM (1 or 2+4MB, maybe?) with a fat or fatter Agnus, and some 2.1 ROMs. If you don't have all of those things, then you will always be tempted to blow more money.
All of this has made me wonder if I can score an accelerator or at least RAM expansion for the A1200 for a reasonable amount of money, though. That would be a fun casemod (separating the keyboard and the rest of the machine) and I've got one lying around. I was supposed to give it away but crap happened.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I owned just about every Amiga model put out in the US, but the A2000 was the workhorse business machine. Coupled with the video toaster card and lightwave it was a video production tool that cost about 1/10th to 1/100th of what it would cost to assemble all of the discreet machines it replaced. With the addition of the Flyer card it also became a non-linear editor, a tough feat in those days. I did a lot of good work with my A2000. I had the SCSI controller and a hard drive (probably 40 - 80 MB in those days)
I was also big into Amiga gaming as it was way ahead of its time compared to PCs and Macs. You would pop in something like Shadow of the Beast and just marvel at the arcade quality parallax scrolling and really nice stereo sampled sound using all those nice custom chips that PCs and Macs did not have.
The linked article is very short on details (there are many) for those of us who lived through it, but even after all this time my own memory of specifics of things is basically gone.
A good book to know why all of this did not last or evolve is "The Rise and Fall of Commodore". For those of us who started with the C=64 era and went out till the end with the Amiga, it's an enlightening and sometimes frustrating read about the politics behind our favorite company.
I think that outside of serious collectors and computer history museums, trying to maintain and fiddle with the hardware today is, well, a dedicated hobby. Best of luck. You're often better off with the emulators out there to get your feet wet.
Within the limitations of technology at the time, the Amiga era was a grand ole time, and we all knew we had the best at the time. Thanks to marketing by other companies who think they invented everything, it will indeed likely be relegated to a forgotten footnote of personal computing history. For those of us who lived it, it was a way of life.
I can tell you I absolutely LOVED the Amiga 2000, this is my most re-purchased Amiga ever. I've had the A1500 (sort of a scaled down 2000) and it's bigger sister (Amiga 3000), A500, and even the A1000 with it's signatures inside, but the Amiga 2000 was exciting to me because I could expand it into oblivion.
Unfortunately cool stuff like the Video Toaster...never made it to Europe (AFAIK, I never saw one except in promos on American TV), but I remember I always wanted one, instead I had to make do with the lame VLAB that bugged out most of the time.
I remember paying $$$ for even the A2091 harddisk controller, and even a small fortune for any xx-mb harddisk back then. The Amiga 2000 was a reliable work horse, I ran my BBS with several modems on that one back in my Demo-Heydays. I loved it for its external keyboard, it felt so much better to code on when I had my Amiga keyboard in my lap instead of that HUGE oversized A500.
Ah, the demoscene, fond memories!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Amiga 2000 is my favorite Amiga computer, but they aren't that cheap on Ebay.
I'd love to get one, mainly if it had the 8088 PC board in it also. Used to love running MS-Dos and Amiga OS at the same time.
But cheap is around $100. $250+ isn't cheap, that is the same price they were selling in the 90's.
Be seeing you...
Many don't realize the impact the much forgotten Amiga 2000
Forgotten? Not by anyone who was in broadcasting in the early 90's. It was quite a machine for us, even though it took all night to render an animated flame-effect title overlay.
I had an A2000 which I soon put a used A2620 card into -- that was the 68020 accelerator which effectively quadrupled the speed of the system. (When was the last time you saw an upgrade card do that??) It was the same card Commodore used in the A2500. It was an amazing machine for its day, not only in terms of graphics and audio, but for sheer processing power.
The thing that always drove me up the wall was SCSI adaptors. They were always tricky to get working -- fiddling with dip switches and jumper pins on the drives, and terminating resistor packs -- and I never had one that worked for a long time. It seemed like there was a steady churn of companies putting an Amiga SCSI card on the market, then going out of business, then another company would take a whack at it. I think I burned through half a dozen completely different SCSI adapters.
Because they're way too big, plain and simple.
The collectible ones are IMO the keyboard models: A500+, A600, A1200.
A500+ is the good ECS one. With 1MB chip and kickstart 37 pretty much guaranteed. I don't own one, but I have an older A500 with the little mod to get 1MB chip, which is almost as good.
A600 is the "bring along" one as it's smaller. Supporting IDE HDs is obviously very convenient. Kickstart 37. Real problems include hardware tending to break more than A500+ and software requiring numpad, which the A600 lacks. Lack of expansion options used to be an issue, but there's some interesting hardware now, such as a crazy fast (relatively) FPGA based accel board.
A1200 is the option with AGA. I own one paired with a 68030 accel board. Together with whdload it's godly for playing Amiga games on the real hardware.
Yeah, you can find a bare-bones Amiga 2000 for not much money. But it's pointless- a bare-bones Amiga 2000 is essentially the same thing as an Amiga 500.
Unless you can get one that has accelerator cards and video cards and hard drives and all that stuff, it's not worth bothering with. Unfortunately, "loaded" Amiga 2000s are EXPENSIVE. All of those expansion cards are hard to come by, and sell for a ridiculous amount of money. Why? I have no idea. I assume it's because of the lunatic Amiga fans that still exist. The poor bastards.
Honestly, UAE (Ultimate Amiga Emulator) is so good, that there simply isn't a reason to own actual Amiga hardware. The emulator is faster, and more flexible, and more stable. And at this point, the only real reason to even mess around with an Amiga is to play the games.
As a general-purpose computer, it sucks. It sucks less than you might think for a nearly 30-year-old system, but it still sucks. Even the latest version of AmigaOS (which is only a couple of years old, I think) is a joke. There are some neat things that the AmigaOS can do, for sure, but most of it is irrelevant nowadays.
There are so many things wrong with your statements here I hardly know where to begin, but I'll bring up a few:
:) Sure it's old, but it's fun, and that's what it's all about.
Emulating hardware isn't perfect, there are things you can do to the original hardware that would literally be impossible to do with an Emulator. There are also numerous timing issues with emulated hardware that would make it very hard to achieve a 100% perfect emulation, especially as you are running under another OS as the host of the emulator (just a program anyway). If you've never coded on a Commodore 64 or an Amiga, you can't possibly know or appreciate this.
A basic Amiga or even a Commodore 64, provides programmers with several challenges. I find it stimulating to code on old school computers simply because we don't have to waste years on classes, libraries and being "nice" to the OS. On C64 this is even easier, but you're limited to a 8 bit system, on the Amiga you're starting out with 16 bit numbers, and this makes coding in Assembly a little bit easier (also compiling with C compilers if that is your taste, I'm an Assembly coder myself).
The good thing with simple basic computers like C64 and Amiga, Atari etc...is that they have relatively known hardware, and you can pretty much ensure that your code will work on 99% of the computers as long as you stick to the basic specs. Try to do that with a PC. There is also a challenge to overcome, the systems limitations makes it very challenging to make your software run faster, 3D routines to work faster, new effects, more colors etc. This may sound trivial to those who have NO understanding why we'd do this, or challenge ourselves to this - but just like coding for an Atari 2600...this can be so much fun, you can only appreciate this...kind of like a good game of chess...albeit chess is a little more predictable than hardware from the 80s
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Well, Used Amigas are in fact notoriously expensive, as much as I love Amiga...I've never truly understood why Amiga lovers wants so much for their old beloved computers, for example - Amiga 4000 sells in Scandinavia (err...they TRY to sell them...) for around 600-2000$...I kid you not! You can pick up an Amiga 500 for around 100$ so that's still affordable if you want to play SuperFrog or watch some cool demos from the glory days of the DemoScene. The action is found on the AGA platform though (A1200 - A4000)
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Everybody knows the Atari ST was superior! /tongueincheek
To make a Hackmiga of course. More hipster cred.
To run a C64 emulator on a PC emulator on a Mac emulation on an Amiga of course. Duh.
Hand in your geek card on your way out.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
In the late 1980ies, the Nuclear Research Facility at Rossendorf near Dresden, Germany had two Amigas 2000 as central processing units for their accelerator experiments. It was fascinating, because Rossendorf was in communist East Germany, and the Amigas probably were bought half-legally for obscene amounts of (east german) money. But appearently they urgently needed the 32bit processing capability and were using selfdeveloped Zorro cards for the signal reception and processing.
Well neither were PCs of the era. Try to get EMS memory programs to run with EMM? No luck. Maybe install a driver in your config.sys? But then it would break other programs. Want to get a CD-ROM? Which type would it be, the kind that hung off your special sound card's bus, a stand-alone CD controller or IDE?
What about your mouse? Think you can bring your mouse over to your friend's house? Hmm, was that a serial mouse or a bus mouse? Which bus?
Got a new sound card? Think that program that only supported the old Soundblaster would work with your new Turtle Beach card? Wait, how many hours of trial and error config.sysing is that going to be?
Mostly random stuff.
There must be lots of Texas A&M sorority girls. :P
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
It was actually "Fat Angus" but for the love of God don't forget the g when googling!