| To directly answer the five questions you asked would take a bit
of digging through this notes file, so I'll try to summarize here..
1) Prices:
The A500 is $699 for a 512K system w/o monitor. For an extra $149
you get a 512K RAM increase and a battery backed clock calender.
It comes equipped with 1 built in 880K DSDD floppy. For ports, it
has the standard serial and parallel, RGB out, monochrome composite
out, twin RCA jacks for stereo output from the four sound channels,
two mouse/joystick ports, external floppy port, and the 86-pin
expansion buss.
There are very few new A1000s left in the world. My boss just bought
one for $795 w/RGB monitor. The 1000 has all of the above ports,
except the composite out is color, not monochrome. The 1000 also
has a detachable keyboard. There are lots of third party memory
boards and hard drives for the 1000 available now.
The A2000 is still not shipping in the states yet. CBM tells us
2 weeks every two weeks. The list price for the A2000 is $1995.
For this, you get all the standard Amiga ports PLUS three IBM slots
and four Amiga Zorro slots. For $495 you get the Amiga Bridge card,
which is an XT on a card with a socket for an 8087 math chip.
The A2000 has room inside for two 3 1/2 " drive and one 5 1/4" drive.
The main advantage of the 2000 is the internal expandability.
2) Memory add-ons:
All three Amigas can be expanded to 9 1/2 megs. The lower 512K is reserved
for use by the custom chip set. The area from 512K to 2 megs is
reserved for future AGNUS chips and larger display requirements,
although some manufacturers are using this reserved area for expansion
memory today. The area from 2 megs to 8 megs is reserved for
autoconfiguring FAST ram. (This does not mean that all other ram
is slow, it's just a name that stuck.)
There are devices available today to take the A1000 to 9.5 megs.
No doubt there will be many expansion boards for the 500 due to
its (so far) healthy sales.
3) Hard Drives
Commodore will be shipping a hard drive for the A2000 'soon'. They
have left the job to the third parties for the 500 and 1000. There
are currently a half-dozev hard drives available for the A1000,
mostly SCSI, a few DMA. A 20 meg SCSI drive can be had for around
$750. Most of these products will probably be adapted to the A500,
which has the same expansion buss as the A1000, but located on the
other side of the unit.
4) Processor
All Amigas use a Motorola 68000 running at 7.16 MHz. This odd number
happens to be exactly twice the standard NTSC video frequency, which
makes the Amiga ideal for video uses. The Atari ST has an 8 Mhz
68000, and can therefore crunch numbers about 11% faster than an
Amiga, but many feel that the Amiga's superior color, sound, and
animation capabilities are a fair tradeoff.
One of the beauties of the Amiga's OS is that it was designed from
scratch to support the full line of Motorola 68*** chips. There
are boards available today that allow installation of a 68020/68881
chipset. The Amiga OS insists on use of 32 bit addressing, so you
can use 32-bit memory with the 68020.
5) disk drives:
All Amigas use 3 1/2" DSDD microfloppies, with a formatted capacity
of 880K. Through the use of a custom mount list, you can install
any 5 1/4" drive and the OS will recognize it.
Hope this helps.
|
| Hmmmm... here we go again... the cost of hardware emulation once
again exceeds the cost of an entire clone, including power supply,
motherboard, keyboard, etc...
I see entire PC-10s selling for less than that!
|