Amiga 1200

By 1992 the Amiga no longer had the graphical edge it had in 1985: PCs with VGA cards showed 256 colours and games were starting to move to the PC. Commodore responded with AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) in two computers: the professional A4000 and the home A1200, launched in October 1992 at £399 in the UK.

AGA brings together three chips: Alice (Agnus's successor), Lisa (Denise's successor) and the same Paula for sound. The palette goes up to 24 bits (16.8 million colours), with up to 256 colours on screen, and the new HAM8 mode shows 262,144 colours at once. Sprites and memory access also got faster.

The processor is a Motorola 68EC020 at 14 MHz, a cheaper version of the 68020 with a 24-bit address bus (16 MB). The machine comes with 2 MB of Chip RAM and no Fast RAM, which makes any accelerator card with fast memory feel like a miracle.

Kickstart 3.0 (later 3.1) comes on two ROMs. It has a PCMCIA port like the A600, internal IDE for 2.5" drives and, underneath, a 150-pin trapdoor connected directly to the processor bus. That is where accelerators go, from the 1990s Blizzard 1230 to modern cards with 68030 processors or FPGAs.

Commodore went bankrupt in April 1994, with the A1200 still on sale. In 1995 Escom bought the brand and started making the A1200 again, with the Amiga Technologies logo, until it too went bust the following year.

Today the A1200 is probably the most active Amiga: there are new motherboards, replacement cases, accelerators and keyboards. Along with the A600, it is also the one that suffers most from leaking SMD capacitors.