I remember when I passed from A500 plus to A1200. Just to be able to install Workbench magic and boot into it like a PC in win 3.1 was so great. Also to hook up IDEs ( it cost a month salary for a 1.5 giga quantum fireball hdd at that time ) made the Amiga a super fast computer. Some month later I got a Blizzard 030 expansion card. All 3D games worked at 60 FPS or more with no lags, loading time almost none existent, theme park, syndicate run super smooth. Truly amazing days. What killed it was there was no more Amiga stores and friends moved to PCs. Soon later the N64 and PS1 came. The rest is history.

The Amiga 1200 is a great machine but it was too little too late. I know components very expensive in 1992, such as ram and hard drive. I do believe Commodore tried to keep the prices down for more sales, but the 020 with 2 MB of ram was not enough even at that time.

Saddest day, when I had to sell my A500 to get an A1200! Got my A500 in 1988. What a wonderful machin it was The first time you could play arcade style/quality games at home. Saved me loads of 10ps! Still got my A1200 and it works perfectly.

01:17 Amiga500 (OCS) could also display EHB (ExtraHalfBrite) mode which is 64 onscreen colours. It's basically a 32 colour mode but then it's cloned and they half the brightness of each cloned colour. Example of games using this are: Pinball Dreams and Fantasies, Black Crypt, Fightin' Spirit and I'm pretty sure Ruff 'n' Tumble. A500 could also use the Copper Chip to interrupt the scanline to add many more onscreen colours. eg: Lionheart, Fire and Ice, Turrican 2, Jim Power. The Copper chip could display 2 (and many more) different resolutions with their own palette on 1 screen at the same time, a number of games do this. Then there was HAM mode which could theoretically display all 4096 colours. 01:22 Paula sound wasn't technically 4 channel stereo sound. It was 4 mono channels connected to a stereo output, 2 for left and 2 for right speaker. 02:10 AGA had a palette of 16.7 million. 256 onscreen colours and 262,144 colours in HAM mode. 02:25 A1200 CPU was clocked at 14.18Mhz PAL and 14.32Mhz NTSC. 02:56 The Sound chip in the A1200 is exactly same as Paula in the A500, one difference they did however was remove one of the low pass filters for the A1200 giving it a slightly "brighter" sound. I have a couple of comparison videos on my channel, one for Battle Squadron hi-score music and another for a Hoffman track where I compare a real A500+ and A1200 to emulated Amiga filters using Protracker Clone for PC.

The Amiga 500 is a obscure personal computer for us in south america, more even the 1200, It would be neat if they was more popular in here in their era.

A1200 was touted in 1992 as next big thing and succesor to A500, but truth to be told 1992-1994(95) were A500's best games years (Turrican II, Toki, Lionhart, Megalomania, Settlers, Dune II, Sensible soccer, etc.)! A500 was everywhere (I still wonder how only about 4.5 million were sold) and I haven't seen A1200 untill much later when Playstation was already a household name and I was dissapointed. All the games I saw were already old news, I have already played then in A500 and I could not spot the any difference on CRT! Even while A1200 versions contained larger number of colors, it all looked the same to me, since I had only my (fading) visual memory of A500 vesrsions to compare it with! The fact that A500 market was during A1200's life was much larger, made developers develop games with A500 as main target and just upscale color number for A1200. Even still to this day of retro gaming, I prefer A500 versions when I play! A1200 was laging behind SNES and even Mega Drive from inception which is mostly visible on Street Fighter II versions which A1200 could not handle. When 3D stuff appeared, we have alredy seen much better stuff on PC and even for that you had to have much more upgraded A1200, so better invest that money into PC. And leaving same sound chip as A500 was major omission. A500 already had problems playing music and effects in game simoultaneously in 4 chanels, so additional a chanel or 2 was very missing. Also, real stereo would help. Commodore was in mess all the way through 80s and 90s and it just shows on botched and compromised design of 1200.

Found your channel from the Amiga Addict Magazine. I really like the Amiga coverage. Where did you get that amazing T-Shirt from, do you sell them?

I had both of these machines and still have my A1200 (still white too); albeit with some modern twists, modern caps, the newest kickstarts, memory card hard drive adaptor, gotek drive and memory upgrade. I haven’t went for any of the updated accelerator cards. I have a raspberry pi running Chris Edward’s excellent images; thusly saving my original hardware for “best”. I went from the A500 with 1MB to an A1200 with 8mb ram upgrade and an adaptor to run a 300mb IDE hard drive. The difference was night and day.

yup, love my amiga 1000, waited got a 1200, all the games looked the same. One year later I got a IBM 486/33, never looked backed. Commodore had it , but dam got lazy or dumb.

I prefer 1200, mostly because of easier expandability and IDE interface.

Nope it did not made A1200 a powerhouse. It made it a machine that was partly inferior to the PC at the same time. The A500 at the time of its release in 1985 however WAS indeed a powerhouse!

Both greatmachines but the A500 enjoyed the Amiga golden years while the far superior A1200 had to face its sad demise... Sad story...

I used to have a500 as a child. Realy thinking of buying it again but after this video im not sure if a1200 would be a better buy

700?

my question is simple - why does the real Amiga or Amiga emulator winuae both need a shapeshifter 3.1 rom in order to run shapeshifter? thanks...........