Lesser-Known Amiga Models

By Jason Compton

In the spirit of my recent listing of Amiga models and their stats, I thought I would write up a quick list of those Amigas which never really made a splash...

The Amiga 6000: Features a 6510, Z80, 8086, and a 68000 in parallel with three HP-PA RISC chips that can run up to 10 simultaneous copies of AmigaDOS 7.2 in 128k of RAM. Unfortunately, C= set up the design team in a small remote New Zealand village, which was completely destroyed in a freak storm. All of the plans (as well as the developers) were lost.

The Amiga 1650: An intermediate machine between a 2000 and a 3000, featuring the short-lived 68025 chip. Only sold in Southern California and some small German border cities.

The CD-RADIO: Commodore's low-end version of the CDTV. It didn't go very far, since it wasn't very visually exciting.

The Amiga Gould: Originally titled the Amiga Gold, intended to be a re-issuing of a souped-up 1000. Irving stepped in, changed the project, drove out all of the people involved and put in an Adam emulator.

The Amiga 10: A brain-installable version of the ECS chipset, CPU, and OS. It made keeping track of more than one thing much easier. There were two major drawbacks. First, remembering things that happened more than a year or so ago required a memory expansion that jutted noticably out of the wearer's head. Second, it was hard to quit a game of Lemmings, so the wearer would tend to walk around saying "Yippee!" a lot. And when that thing guru'd...people would get VERY afraid, as the wearer's eyes would flash on and off in green.

The Air Commie: A short-lived partnership between C= and Nike yielded a shoe which would allow the wearer to jump in more than one direction. Only a few prototypes were produced, and when the NBA declared that the shoe would violate its rules, the project was scrapped.

Finally, the AmiPad: A proposed project, containing a full 4000 system with multisync display, Video Toaster, and stereo sound in a case the size of a TI-85 calculator. Never developed due to lack of market.