Discussion on:

Commodore Amiga 2000 Teardown

I loved my Amiga's. Had a 500, 1000, and 2000.

All stellar computers. Too bad this had to fade away. I was always hoping this would replace the Mac, but didn't happen.

WHERE IS IT BRING IT BACK?????

http://www.amiga.com/

These were a fantastic piece of equipment, 20mb and you were the dogs doo dacks and if you managed to partition 40mb... phew stand by to stand by... you'll never fill that space

The LF347N is an FET input operational amplifier. The data sheet is still available on the web - go figure! Made my Motorola / ON Semiconductor.
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheets/105/64811_DS.pdf

In 1993 I had a German Amiga 4000 with NewTek's VideoToaster for video editing and animation, and it was great. I produced on it my first animation and it was legendary! I have no idea why the machine went down in faded glory. Combined with VT, A4000 was a powerful warhorse that never crashed or misbehaved in any way. If they resurface back, I believe many producers would gladly use them.

Commodore incorrectly estimated their Christmas stock two years in a row, causing a flood of canceled orders and a general loss of confidence in the company.
I still miss my A500. 4096 colors in HAM mode, whoa! Fringing and all, it was STILL the best video machine out there.

... it's not even close to the whole story. The big problem was that Commodore had become a very stable, reliable business in the late 1980s/early 1990s. And that didn't sit well with the corporate bosses. So starting in 1991, they started replacing management... with a bunch of clueless dolts.

As with many "C" level people, the first thing the new guys did was cover their tracks, primarily by cancelling the ongoing developments (Amiga 1000+, Amiga 3000+), and pushing their own ideas on the market. For example, the Amiga 300... which was supposed to be kind of an Amiga-meets-Commodore64, cheaper than the Amiga 500, became the Amiga 600... generally less desirable than the Amiga 500, but more expensive.

The first big Christmas gaffe was over the Amiga 1200, in 1992. We had been on schedule to deliver "AA" (later "AGA") Amigas in spring of 1992. But after the management change, most of those projects were cancelled... as were the production agreements with HP (one of the AA chips was a bit too much for Commodore's in-house semiconductor fab). When these systems were turned on again, they were barely available by Christmas 1992, and yet, the fact of the Amiga 1200 -- only in short supply due to the chip supply screwups, ensured no one wanted the A600.

I could go one, but there's no joy in it.

...I still had my Commodore Amiga 500 with 1 meg of RAM. (That extra 1/2 meg cost A FORTUNE!)

74244 is an Octal buffer/line driver; 3-state
The 74000 series is often pin compatible across manufacturers though you never know.
http://www.datasheetcatalog.org/datasheet2/e/0zy6rs8yr07awcatlhf5787yl6py.pdf

(I can hear Mr Spock saying "Stone knives and bear skins...")

I remember when any PC tech would recognize a Fujitsu 3 1/2" drive from a single view. Now it takes a dozen shots for techs to know what it is, as they marvel at a dinosaur.

I feel old
(sigh)

This brings back fond memories. A computing marvel with it's Fat(ter) Agnus, Denise and Pre-emptive multitasking Amiga OS and Kickstart.

Let me share a little secret. This gallery has 87 images and more than 2000 words of text. It took about 4 hours to disassemble the machine and take the photos and another 6 hours to enter the image titles and descriptions.

If you searched the entire gallery, you would find the word "drive" 57 times. After seeing your note, I went back and found 1 instance where I meant to type "drive" instead of "driver". Honestly, I don't think 1 mistake out of 57 words manually entered into dozens of separate text boxes is an editorial atrocity--likewise for the other two typos.

You asked if I proofread. The answer is yes. But after writing dozens of titles, editing them in both a WYSIWYG and HTML tools, even the best editors miss the occasional typo.

While you may have a point about the errors, they are extremely minor in the context of an article of this size. On the other hand your reply sucks big time when it comes to grammar. Remember the old saying about those who live in "Glass Houses".

I bought one new back then, I had the flicker fixer video card and was able to run a vga monitor. Also had a SCSI controller card with 30 pin memory stick cache on it. I also had a 500 before that one with an external HD. My father worked at Seagate at the time so I could get them cheaper.

I love the quality of the substrate. These days circuit boards are printed on crap - just look in any boom box. That Amiga MB has gorgeous fiberglass under it.

But then, I only used our Macs at college a little bit and not nearly as much as my Amiga. Ho-hum to you, eh?
BTW, does anyone remember a show called Babylon 5? IF I remember correctly, all the SFX on that show were done using the VideoToaster.

Babylon 5 used ONLY Amigas equipped with a Video Toaster for the pilot episode. After that they used different platforms, Mac and Wintel machines.

Babylon 5 was always rendered using NewTek's Lightwave 3D. Foundation Imaging did seasons 1-3, Netter Digital Imaging did the work for seasons 4 and 5, all using Lightwave 3D. Which didn't run on a Mac.

For the first season, Foundation Imaging used a rendering farm of Amigas. During the work for the second season, once they got access to Lightwave 3D for Windows NT, they added Alpha, and at some point, x86 machines. These eventually took over the rendering farm... the better Alphas in those days were something like 25x faster than the best Amiga you could get, particularly for rendering work. You can see this in the show... once they had dramatically more rendering power, the 3D space scenes got more detailed.

Macs were involved, but not in the 3D world. They used Macs for Editing, Matte paintings and Compositing, and SGI's for Compositing and titling, over the course of the series.

Now.. take this from a guy who's biased... the "HAYNIE" on that Amiga motherboard is me. I did the Amiga 2000 system design.

The AmigaOS and the MacOS each had a piece. The Amiga's strength was the low-level stuff: the kernel, the drive models, etc. was far, far superior to the Mac's. Their OS-proper wasn't much of an advance over the 8-bit stuff from the 70s.

The Mac, on the other hand, had some high-level advantages. So while the Amiga's graphics were crazy fast compared to the Macs of the same day, the graphics.library API was very tightly coupled to the Amiga chipset. MacOS didn't support graphics acceleration at the time, but it could work on add-on graphics cards, something that didn't happen much later for AmigaOS.

They both did things, like device abstraction, much better than the PC of the day.

Hardware wise, the 68K Macs were pretty heinous... they did everything with minimal hardware, with the idea that software was inherently single-tasking. On the Amiga, we would use interrupts where the Mac used polling, DMA where the Mac used interrupts.

at the time, amiga was the BEST, the mind boggles as to where amiga would be today, had it continued i dare say that bill gates would have disappeared years ago and steve jobs would also be in trouble.

You've obviously never heard of Apples reaction to the Amigas launch?

The Amiga was orders of magnitude SUPERIOR to the Mac, and Apple knew it!

Honestly, some people obviously don't have a clue!

Wish someone would bring it back...the underlying architecture is still better than anything we have today. Shoving everything through the CPU was never a good idea, adding multiple cores didn't fix the flawed IBM design.

The beauty of the Amiga was its custom chipsets consisting of several coprocessors, which handled audio, video and direct memory access independently of the CPU. This architecture freed up the Amiga's processor for other tasks and gave the Amiga a performance edge and is still a far better design. Anyone remember Denise, Agnus, Paula and Gary?

I'll always remember the games and the battle against those who had atari st's

Still setting in my old basement computer room with all (Many floppy disk, both sizes and different hardware to plug into it) I think this would have been the computer of the future but something went wrong) Oh well, I start it up once on a while and say to myself, Wow! this is great and way ahead of all the others in it's time. You all have to admit with an open mind that it was a great machine. Think I'll go down and start her up!
Anyone looking for one with many many many extras get hold of me

A computer with many traits. Install the PC board and get a PC compatible. Get yourself some Mac roms and run Mac software. Starting from WorkBench 1.2 where you had to boot from a floppy. Upgrade to 1.3 with a new ROM and you have yourself a computer booting from a hard disk. Finally the last major upgrade was WorkBench 2.0 and you had a machine that could truly multi-task. No time slicing here with this machine, a true muti-tasking OS. The machine did it all, Desktop Publishing, Video Editing, Gaming, Music Editing. To bad the Amiga line ended

I still have 3 Amiga 1200's one in a tower with an 060 card, and 2 A500's, all work and still get used when I feel like a blast of nostaga, easy to program for as well,

This takes me back. I had an A2000 with the upgraded CPU, 68020 if I recall. I also had an A1000 and an A500 before that, I still have an A3000 sitting in my basement. Wonder if there is still a market to sell it. At one time there were a lot of avid AMIGA users still looking for the classics.

I stumbled on this recently. Hopefully, the projects they have going will come to fruition. I would love to have a new 64 and a new Amiga.
http://www.commodoreusa.net/CUSA_Home.aspx

#70: Yeah, that was a Signetics 68000... Hitachi also made them. Commodore, being a chip company, used to crack the lid of any major chip we sourced externally, to analyze the technology. In short, we knew what they cost to make. So we were buying 68000s for $2.50 when Apple was paying $8.00. That gets significant when you make a million or more computers in a year.

#71 Yeah, that's Fat Agnus. The three Amiga chips acted as one. Agnus worried about memory access, and also generated the "register address", which basically told Paula and Denise (the other two chips) who the cycle was for, and which direction. Agnus also contained the bit-blitter, and served as the interface to the CPU.

#72 The ROM was 256K for AmigaOS 1.x, but expanded to 512K for Amiga 2.0. Both sized were supported for the A2000.

#77 Buster doesn't mean "bus terminator", it's the bus controller. The Amiga 2000 bus was fairly simple, but this device (my design) replaced a number of expensive high-speed PAL devices, which were used to implement external Zorro bus controllers on the Amiga 1000 and Amiga 500. This also manages the "coprocessor" protocol, which allows a CPU accelerator card to be dropped into the CPU slot and take over the system from the built-in 68K.

#80 The National Semiconductor LF347 is a quad low-speed operational amplifier. Part of this was used in the reset circuitry -- the "Cntl-Amiga-Amiga" sequence generated a special condition over the two-wire keyboard interface, which was detected and driven as a hardware reset to the system.

#81 Those are HCT244s, which are bus drivers. Those shown are for the chip bus.

#82, #83 These are the bus drivers for the Zorro bus, address and data. These are bidirectional.. both data and address can be driven either way.

#84 Those look like data drivers for the chip bus... all that DRAM. Well, all those DRAM chips... 1MB is hardly "lots" by modern standards, but this was 1986.

#86 Yeah, there's me and Fish. In late 2005 and early 2006, Commodore was reeling over financial problems, and there were a total of three rounds of layoffs. On the other side of that inscription, it used to read "the few, the proud, the remaining" and then we had the initials for everyone still left in Commodore West Chester Engineering. For some inexplicable reason, we didn't get to keep that... but that's probably why we got to keep the HAYNIE/FISHER.

#87 Yeah, the case was big and ugly, and very industrial -- a product of Commodore's German division. The location of the mouse and keyboard ports was a very bad idea... we had crazy problems with noise from the memory array coupling to those ports.. there's a big reason PCs always put this stuff in the back, or run cables to the front if they need a front port.

Anyway, thanks for featuring one of my creations!

Thank you so much for joining my discussion and posting the correction about the Buster chip and all the other fantastic information. I've updated the image's description and added a note about your post to the first image.

Again, thank you!

It's not everyday... anymore... that I come across questions or articles about the Amigas. So it's kind of a treat to me, too, to see these things going by.

And the A2000 was kind of my journeyman project. I had been the #2 guy on the Commodore 128, a year or so out of school. After the main guy, Bil Herd left, I was all of a sudden the top guy on the 8-bit stuff. But I had already started playing with the Amiga, and really wanted to work on that.

Commodore West Chester got our first Amiga system project in the summer of 1986, with the Amiga 500. George Robbins, Bob Welland, and Victor Andrade had figured out how to consolidate the fairly complex Amiga 1000 design into a much more compact form. As the 8-bit stuff was fading, I was brought in to help out... and of course, to learn the system.

About a month later, we got the task of taking the German Amiga 2000 design (which was essentially an Amiga 1000 with an integral Zorro bus, and the stupid PC slots for the "Bridge Board") to something more production worthy (in Commodore speak... "cheap"). That meant using the Amiga 500 chipset, and integrating the expansion bus.

This was an obvious project for George. Just before Commodore has bought Amiga, George and Bob had become the third engineering term to work on the "Commodore 900". This was a totally different personal computer, based on the 16-bit Z8000 processor. It ran a UNIX clone called Coherent, and was going to ship initially with a high resolution monochrome display. Pretty much a Sun 2 for the masses. The previous two teams failed to get it working, George and Bob did. Then it was cancelled... Commodore wasn't going to deal with two "16-bit" systems at once.

Thing was, the Amiga 500 was George's baby by then.. he didn't want to give it up. So I took on the Amiga 2000, all by myself (well, certainly with lost of help from the two A500 guys, at least in understanding what they had done with the custom chips).

Bob and I also worked on the CPU cards that created the Amiga 2500 series (68020 and 68030 powered). Bob left for Apple where he was one of the main guys on the Newton, then on to Microsoft. One of the few guys I know to have achieved a personal computer industry hat-trick!

when an entire platform could be the project of an engineer or two.

Well, that's really just an assumption. I'm not an engineer, but PCs today are a heck of a lot more complex. It's certainly true of computer games. It takes a movie-like production crew to release a title now that sprites and scrolling backgrounds have fallen by the wayside.

Most of the PC today is designed at the chip level. There's a ton of work going on there, but that also kind of locks in the design. This is why you don't see a great deal of difference from system to system. Some of it's pretty tricky at the PCB level, particularly things like high-speed DDR2/DDR3 memory layout, but the design of these is locked in by the CPU these days on AMD and Intel "i" series -- and was by the system chipset back in the "old" days of the Core2 chips.

And in fact, the number of companies actually doing motherboard design is fairly small as well. Most of those Taiwanese companies that make the boards in kits for hackers, like Gigabyte, ASUS, etc. also make main boards for Dell, HP, etc. If you're a big company, you call these guys up, tell 'em what you want, and you'll get that board... for way less than you can make it yourself, even if you're doing HP volumes. This was even becoming true about PCs in the latter days of Commodore.

This is awesome stuff. It's not every day that the information-hungry of us can get an engineer's personal reflections on an historical design.

And Bill -- I love this series. I don't know what it is, but I love seeing the guts of devices big, small, new and old. I was surprised to see the first teardown article, and QUITE pleasantly surprised that it caught on and flourished.

Thanks to both of you. This article was a real find today.

Thanks for the trip down memory lane! The Amiga was an awesome machine. Too bad Commodore was run by a bunch of greedy vultures who destroyed the company for their own profit. Hopefully they lost everything quickly and died dirt poor after long and miserable life. (Too harsh? Naaaa...

It's safe to say I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing now if it wasn't for my trusty A500. I learned so much on that machine that really isn't possible on today's PCs. It was fun too. Today's machines are too complex and locked down (except for Linux).

I remember spending $800 for a 40meg HD with a 2meg RAM expansion. I had a 14.4 Supramodem too which cost me about $350. I was poor, but a total badazz! LOL

It broke my heart when I moved and had to unload a bunch of old stuff. Since I didn't have a working monitor and couldn't find one, the Amiga went in the dumpster in its original box along with my old Radio Shack Color Computer II, also in original box. Along with them went a yard bag full of floppy disks. It was a sad day.

That last paragraph made me think of when I got rid of both of my Amiga's.

I shall never forgive you