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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.
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.
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.
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.