While Commodore had problems supplying enough A1000s in the early days, it soon became apparent that the A1000 lacked the expansion options needed to be a serious contender in the business market – businesses would buy IBM instead, but was too expensive as a computer for kids and games – this market was dominated by 8-bit machines such as the Commodore 64, and cheaper 16-bit machines like the Atari ST. There is no way of booting from a hard disk without significant modification to the motherboard. There was an expansion port named Zorro on the right hand side of the computer which allowed connection of a PC-XT (Intel 8088) hardware emulator or fast ram expansion. Kickstart disks up to 1.3 were made available for the A1000. This was important at the time because versions 1.0 and 1.1 of the operating system were quite buggy and users needed the ability to upgrade easily. The machine also boasted four channels of direct memory access PCM sound, allowing samples to be played directly from chip ram.īoth portions of the operating system came on disk, with Kickstart needing to be loaded into a special RAM board when the machine is first powered on. The unusual speed of the chipset allowed output video in real time without the need for frame buffering, meaning less RAM was required - this trick was used in colour computers from the early days, famously including the Atari VCS which is the direct technical ancestor of the Amiga. The video, sound, mouse/joystick, and floppy drive I/O were all taken care of in the chipset with direct memory access, leaving the CPU free to do other tasks much like a modern graphics card does today. The clock speed for the machine is important, as it is either double the colorburst frequency for NTSC or 1.6x the colorburst frequency for PAL.
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