Amiga 4000T: The Best Amiga in the World | Hacker News Reader

Amiga 4000T: The Best Amiga in the World

forgottencomputer.com

42 pointscodewiz25 comments

The A4000T looked too much like a commodity machine (cost-cutting measure?). It felt very different from the rest of the Amiga line-up. Especially, as the A3000T looked more like a Unix workstation and did not have the baydoor. I did see them advertised in CU Amiga, but they were too expensive. It was aimed at the higher-end due to the inclusion of an internal SCSI interface, and plenty of space to have VideoToaster and disks installed. However, most A4000s I worked on/seen, were all the regular desktop case.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_4000T states the following about the case:

""" The case itself was a re-purposed PC case which is evidenced by the presence of the Turbo button whose function in A4000T was to disable the internal speaker """

https://bigbookofamigahardware.com/bboah/product.aspx?id=31 states:

""" The A4000T from Commodore only saw a limited production of machines (estimated at 100-200) before they went bust in 1994, most machines never made it to the market but ended at third party developers and the local Commodore companies. A recent BBoAH study (2013), indicates that the number machines still existing is VERY low (only a handfull of named owners has been found so far).

In an email from 1996 send from Peter Kittel to a german A4000T user, Peter wrote "that only ~35 Machines got deliverd WORKING to customers, ~35 where NOT working. All in all only ~70 machines left Commodore for customers." That would explain why it is so hard to find somebody owning such a machine. For this reason the Commodore Amiga 4000T is considered the rarest commercial available home computers ever made. """

The later non-Commodore A4000Ts in TFA, however, are much better systems IMHO than the original Commodore-badged one and far easier to get. I've got one here too, with a QuikPak '060, Picasso IV RTG and Ethernet, and it runs very well in AmigaOS 3.9.

The only thing about the ESCOM and QuikPak Amiga 4000Ts that were not great were the floppy drives, which I’m told were modified PC floppy drives. They worked, but weren’t the most reliable either.

Modified to spin at half speed, that was the only way to make Amiga read HD floppies with its 9 year old never updated floppy controller.

Honestly, I’m amazed it took Commodore so long to properly support high density floppies. I’m pretty sure they stuck to the double density 880K GCR format right up to the 4000 series Amiga. Meanwhile, Atari was supporting high density media in some capacity as early as 1990 in their higher end systems.

I have a 4000T in an Eagle case.

This version: https://amigaland.de/eagle-4000te

It provided a lot more space for peripherals, and (for the time) looked better than the stock A4000T (in my opinion).

So it kinda came out did it? I remember seeing it in PC Mag, I guess 93 and thinking man Amiga is in a lot of trouble. My best friend at the time wanted one so badly and I thought he was nuts because to me it was clear as day the 4000 was the last Amiga, NT was amazing and from build 189 on, Windows 95 was clearly going to be good, and it was. I think by late 1995 I'd forgotten all about Amiga my friend never got a T because amiga died, and we all switched to windows machines. I still feel like if gnome and kde hadn't been in competition, linux would have stood a chance around that time, especially if Mandrake had gone more mainstream.

Windows 95 had Plug'n'Play going for it, even if famously it was more accurately called Plug'n'Pray in the early years. I don't think Linux had anything like that at that point, although it did get module support in 1995, so at least you didn't have to recompile the kernel anymore to get your peripherals to work... in theory, anyway.

Plug'n'play certainly wasn't a reason to switch from Amiga to PC though, since the Amiga had that a decade before Win95 ;)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoconfig

You're right. I totally forgot about hand rolling audio drivers. Nothing worked... But when it did... It felt cool!

Perhaps even rarer was the DraCo by MacroSystem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DraCo

It was an Amiga clone based on the 4000T, omitted some of the Amiga chipset, and was targeted at non-linear video editing.

It was basically a highly specialized machine made for raw power...

I saw one in real at a computer fair and was impressed what it could do. They showed several videos running at the same time, chock full of storage.

A return of the 1980s home computer form factor in modern tech could be awesome:

Imagine a laptop but with a full-sized keyboard. Doesn't need to be razor thin. More like a portable desktop. Make it wedge-shaped like the Amiga A500 or C64 or Atari ST 520. All the ports. Maybe a detachable display that can fold like a regular laptop clamshell, but optional so you could buy one without a display.

Maybe an operating system that lets you code and create as soon as you take it out of the box and plug it in, and it could be perfect for reintroducing the magic of computers to a new generation.

Ideally, something that’s not yet-another-Raspberry-Pi computer kit. We have plenty of those.

I like your idea too, with perhaps more bespoke parts for educational purposes.

Why on Earth would they have designed the lock so that it would not respond to mouse moves or keyboard input but WOULD respond to mouse clicks?

Is it possible there was an intended use case where the machine was set to do exactly one thing, which could be safely triggered by anyone with a mouse click event? Or was it simply that mouse clicks without mouse moves were low risk enough to not bother limiting them?

If I recall correctly, AmigaOS had a boot menu that would be triggered by holding down both mouse buttons at boot time. Not saying that's the reason for the oddity, I don't see why it would be useful to see a menu if you can't select anything.

Oh, now there's an interesting theory, thanks!

There was recently a comment how someone is still using Atari ST for low latency MIDI because modern PCs can't do it out-of-box [1]. Does Amiga have something that modern PCs can't do? If I remember correctly, Amiga didn't have MIDI out-of-box.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44150678

> Does Amiga have something that modern PCs can't do?

Until TV became digital, Amigas were commonly used for creating titles and overlays for TV shows well after they became obsolete for the rest of the world. Nowadays, I couldn't think of anything the Amiga would really do better than modern hardware.

One thing modern OSes still don't do that the Amiga did is datatypes. If your Amiga didn't have the JPEG.datatype file, the OS and your apps couldn't use JPEGs, but once you added it, the OS and ALL your apps supported JPEG.

That is very true, and it's kind of amazing that this hasn't been picked up by contemporary operating systems.

For the ST, the midi was wired to the CIA so basically right to the CPU, Amiga had Paula. https://amitopia.com/amiga-was-already-capable-of-14bit-play...

I seem to recall amiga midi getting a bit of critique (at least when used with Bars and Pipes) for adding latency when doing MIDI. For hobbyists, this probably wasn't a showstopper, but for serious use it would be lots more important.

The best Amiga ever is clearly the 3000 ;)

Sure, the 4000 models were faster, but the 3000 had the looks (while especially the 4000T looks too much like a boring no-name PC).

What about the AmigaOne series? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AmigaOne

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