Amiga 1200

The Amiga 1200, or A1200 (code-named "Channel Z"), is a personal computer in the Amiga computer family released by Commodore International, aimed at the home computer market. It was launched on October 21, 1992, at a base price of £399 in the United Kingdom () and $599 in the United States (). The A1200 was launched a few months after the Amiga 600, using a similar slimline design that replaced the earlier Amiga 500 Plus and Amiga 500. Whereas the A600 used the 16-bit Motorola 68000 of earlier Amigas, the A1200 was built around the 32-bit Motorola 68EC020. Physically, the A1200 is an all-in-one design incorporating the CPU, keyboard, and disk drives (including the option of an internal 2.5" hard disk drive) in one physical unit. The A1200's hardware architecture was later used as the basis for Commodore's Amiga CD32 game console in 1993. Initially, only 30,000 A1200s were available at the UK launch. During the first year of its life the system reportedly sold well, but Commodore ran into cash flow problems and filed for bankruptcy. Worldwide sales figures for the A1200 are unknown, but 95,000 systems were sold in Germany before Commodore's bankruptcy. After Commodore's demise in 1994, the A1200 almost disappeared from the market but was later relaunched by Escom in 1995. The new Escom A1200 was priced at £399, and it came bundled with two games, seven applications and AmigaOS 3.1. It was initially criticized for being priced 150 pounds higher than the Commodore variant that had been sold for two years prior. It also came with a modified PC floppy disk drive that is incompatible with some Amiga software. The A1200 was finally discontinued in 1996 as the parent company folded. The machine is reported to have sold 95,500 units in Germany. The A1200 offers a number of advantages over earlier lower-budget Amiga models. It is a 32-bit design; the 68EC020 microprocessor is faster than the 68000 and has 2 MB of RAM as standard. The AGA chipset used in the A1200 is a significant improvement. AGA increases the color palette from 4096 colors to 16.