No Commodore but real USA
Commodores Amiga?
Sven Harvey Micromart UK takes a look at new CommodoreUSA Amiga Mini
The new Commodore in the USA is now the only Commodore after its taken control over the brand.
It`s also licenced Amiga brand from Amiga Inc., and it has been working on uniting the brands for quite a while.
The product that was to be the first „Commodore Amiga“ since 1994 has gone true lot of changes since the agreement was reached between the two companies, while Hyperion Entertaiment quite rightly challenged the agreement following the settlement that awarded it an exclusive perpetual worldwide right to the brand, at least in some form.
Commodore had planned on doing new Amiga 1000, 2000, 3000 and so on, but the first product to break cover and become available to order is in a 7,5 x 7,5″ mini-ITX case.
The Commodore Amiga Mini will be available in silver or black and is distinctive in that it features a molded-in Commodore „chickenhead“ logo on the top of the casing, while and embossed Amiga logo (in the original form) adorns the front of the casing along with the silver Commodore Amiga case badge very much in the traditional style.
There are few confusion on the Commodore website regarding the specifications. In one place it seems to suggests 16GB RAM comes as standard whereas elsewhere it sais 4GB. Filtering the pages it seems the standard specification was originally going to be what is now the highest end, but reaction to the pricing has resulting in lower specs being available.
The motherboard is of mini-ITX form factor and comes with 1GB (DDR3) nVIDIA GT430 GPU board as standard. From there you can choose processor, either a dual core i3-2130 at 3,4Ghz, quad core i5-2500K, or the quad core i7-2600K. Memory can be configured as 4,8 or 16GB, while blue ray slot loading optical drive (with DVD R/RW) comes as standard. A 1TB hard disk is the default option, while 2 SSD options are available.
The machines comes with CommodoreOS Vision – a customized Linux distribution based on MINT and Debian with bunch of pre-installed software.
Sounds all very PC doesn`t it? There is a reason for that. This is no more an Amiga then HP laptop from TESCO. The name is on it, but no Amiga-related technology resides within the hardware nor the software. Amiga Forever isn`t even bundled, thou it is suggestion on Commodores site that machine can run 16-bit and 32-bit Amiga software. The question is how because without Amiga Forever package, it cannot legally include the Amiga kickstart ROM code …
With pricing ranging from USD 1 500 up to nearly 3 000$ including 600GB SSD option, its a good job. The casing is available as barebones (thou this included the blue-rays sloat loading drive) at 345 USD.
The question is, without AmigaOS, should it have the name at all?
Find out more at http://www.commodoreusa.net
AmigaOne X1000
Following the complete sell out of the AmigaOne X1000 first contact systems, A-EON has commissioned further run of initial systems, so if you are happy to spend the money and get sonething really different running the AmigaOS 4.1 (and soon 4.2) you might want to keep an eye on www.amigakit.leamancomputing.com/x1000/
Sven Harvey has been our Amiga specialist for over 12 years, drawing on his vast computing knowledge which is itself the result of 21 years of retailing computer and video games.
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