Subject: REVIEW: Commodore Amiga 4000
From: [email-masked] (John Lindwall)
Date: 24 Nov 1992 15:09:32 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.sys.amiga.reviews

PRODUCT NAME

	Commodore Amiga 4000 computer

BRIEF DESCRIPTION

	The Amiga 4000 (A4000) is a 68040-based system running at 25 MHz.
The system comes with a 120 MB hard drive and high-density floppy drive.
The A4000 includes the new AGA chipset allowing 256 color screens and HAM8
screens.

COMPANY INFORMATION

	Name:		Commodore Business Machines
	Address:	1200 Wilson Drive
			West Chester, PA 19380
			USA

LIST PRICE

	$3699 (US).  Actual store prices in my area are closer to $3000 (US).

INTRODUCTION

	The Amiga 4000 (A4000) was introduced at the World Of Commodore Amiga
Show (WOCA) in mid-September of 1992.  I got my first look at the machine at
WOCA and was impressed enough to purchase one.

	I am very happy with the machine; it is much nicer then the A1000 it
replaced. :-)  This review was written after using the A4000 for 2 weeks.

HARDWARE

	Benchmarks!  Thats all you people care about!  :-)  Many people have
already posted A4000 benchmark results to the net so I'll quickly summarize
some results from my machine.  Sysinfo 3.01 claims:  17910 DhryStones, 18.69
MIPS, 4.73 MFLOPS.  AIBB 5.0 includes performance figures from the A4000.  My
machine matched the expected results listed by AIBB 5.0; using 68020+ or
68040-specific math routines resulted in an up to 10x speed up over the
listed speeds.

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  Steve Koren's review of the A4000 appeared
	previously in comp.sys.amiga.reviews and contains tables of benchmark
	information.  This review is available on our ftp site and by
	request as usual. - Dan]

	The appearance of the A4000 is not stylish like the A3000 -- it
looks a lot like a PC clone.  All in all, it looks better then I recalled it
(from seeing it WOCA).  I do like the ivory color if box, keyboard, & mouse.

	Poor aesthetics is a price I happily pay, however, since the box has
plenty of room inside for expansion unlike the A3000.  The A4000 can hold:

   Front bay: 1 half-height 5.25" device.
              1 half-height 3.5" device OR 2 low profile 3.5" devices.
   Rear bay:  1 half-height 3.5" device or 2 low profile 3.5" devices.

From gossip on the nets and from briefly examining my system, it appears
that the supplied floppy drive is half-height, and therefore too tall to
allow space underneath for a second floppy drive.  Apparently, two 25mm-high
floppy drives can be stacked in the front bays.  The hard-drive appears to
be low-profile (taking up one of the two rear 3.5" slots).

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  From discussion with the reviewer, it seems he
	is not 100% sure whether the floppy drive is too tall or not.  I
	would appreciate it if someone from Commodore could clear up this
	question, since I do NOT want to start any rumors.  My dealer told
	me that you CAN fit a second floppy drive underneath.  When I get an
	official answer, I will update this review. - Dan]

	The hard drive supplied with my A4000 is a Seagate ST3144A, a 3.5"
IDE drive.  I can't say I have much joy over getting a Seagate drive; I'm not
impressed with their track record.  Hopefully, this model of drive will be
problem-free.  Only time will tell.  The drive came preformatted, with an 8
Meg Workbench: partition, and a 116 Meg Work: partition.

| Hard Disk performance (as reported by DiskSpeed 4.2) is summarized below:
| 
| MKSoft DiskSpeed 4.2  Copyright 1989-92 MKSoft Development
| ------------------------------------------------------------
| CPU: 68040  AmigaOS Version: 39.106  Normal Video DMA
| Device:  hd1:    Buffers: 330
| 
| CPU Speed Rating: 3107
| 
| Testing directory manipulation speed.
| File Create:          250 files/sec  |  CPU Available: 12%
| File Open:            324 files/sec  |  CPU Available: 8%
| Directory Scan:      1696 files/sec  |  CPU Available: 15%
| Seek/Read:           1381 seeks/sec  |  CPU Available: 16%
| 
| [Performance peaked with the following parameters:]
| Testing with a 262144 byte, MEMF_FAST, LONG-aligned buffer.
| Create file:       264110 bytes/sec  |  CPU Available: 80%
| Write to file:     459955 bytes/sec  |  CPU Available: 72%
| Read from file:    774809 bytes/sec  |  CPU Available: 45%
| 
| [CPU usage summary was as follows:]
| 
| Average CPU Available: 72%  |  CPU Availability index: 2237

	The A4000 comes with 6MB of RAM; 2 MB Chip RAM and 4MB Fast RAM.
There are 5 SIMM Slots in the A4000.  One slot is intended for a 2MB Chip
RAM SIMM, which is of course included with the computer.  The other four
slots are for Fast RAM expansion, and each slot can hold either a 1MB SIMM
or a 4MB SIMM.  All fast RAM SIMMS must be of the same type.  Fortunately,
Commodore used a 4MB SIMM to supply the A4000's 4MB Fast RAM instead of
using 4 1MB SIMMS.  This means I can upgrade to 8, 12, or 16 MB of Fast RAM
just by adding additional 4MB SIMMS in the remaining three empty slots.  The
use of SIMMS (instead of ZIPS as in the A3000) is a good thing, as SIMMS are
used in PC's and hence are widely available and inexpensive.

	The high-density floppy supplied with the A4000 works great.

	One thing that caused me a moment of confusion was trying to use a
high-density floppy in df0: that had been formatted (under 1.3) as an 880K
Amiga floppy.  The high-density drive recognizes the disk as a high-density
disk, so it claimed that the disk was not a DOS floppy.  Moral:  either
don't format high-density floppies to 880K, or (if you must) put tape over
the floppy's high-density notch.

	The mouse/joystick connectors are inconveniently located on the left
side of the unit.  This would be OK if the supplied mouse had a long cable.
Unfortunately, the mouse cable is woefully short IMHO; I worked around this
problem by setting my A4000 on a stand and feeding the mouse cable from
underneath the unit.  A mouse-extender cable would also do the trick.
Left-handed people won't have this problem.

	The mouse is one I've not seen before from C=.  It resembles a
MicroSoft ("Dove bar") mouse and is shaped nicely.  The button click is very
nice as well.  A nice improvement.

	The keyboard is adequate.  The feel of the keys is OK.  I wish that
the backspace key were double width, like on my A1000 and the PClones at
work.

	The A4000 front panel has a power LED, hard drive access LED, floppy
drive, power switch, and a key lock with 2 identical keys.  When the system
is locked using the key, the system will not accept input from the mouse or
keyboard.  Mouse _buttons_ are still recognized however, so the manual
cautions you not to leave the mouse pointer resting on a gadget or icon!

	The rear of the A4000 has:  stereo sound output (2 RCA jacks),
external floppy port, video port, parallel port, serial port, keyboard plug,
and power cable plug.  There is also a plug for your monitor's power cable,
so that when you turn on the A4000 the monitor comes on as well.  This is a
nice touch.  I'll need to get a adapter plug for my monitor cable so I can
use this feature.

	The fan in the A4000 is reasonably quiet.  It is quieter then the
Compaq DeskPro 50M at work; but (of course) much noisier then the almost
silent A1000 fan.  I can live with it.

	The A4000 case is very easy to open; remove two screws on the back
and pop open the cover.  Much easier then many PC's I've used.  One of these
screws is covered by a warranty sticker; removing the sticker apparently can
void your warranty.

	My 5 year-old A1010 drive works just fine connected to the external
floppy port (It is df2: instead of df1: of course).

	I have not tried any Zorro II or Zorro III boards in my A4000.

GRAPHICS

	By now, you're all familiar with the graphics capability of the AGA
chips so I won't repeat the specs here.  Suffice to say that the new modes
really shine!  I haven't collected a lot of 256 color/HAM8 pictures yet but
the ones I have are beautiful.

SOFTWARE

	The A4000 includes AmigaDOS 3.0 pre-installed on the hard drive.
3.0 is a tremendous advance from 1.3.  Compared to 2.04 it is "merely" a
significant improvement. 

	The WorkBench looks the same as the 2.04 WorkBench, except that menus
are now displayed as black text on a white background instead of vice versa.

	The Shell seems the same a in 2.04.  I use WShell 2.0 myself, which
has many improvements of the standard Shell.  WShell works just great under
3.0.

	I won't bother to list the improvements of 3.0 over 1.3.  In
comparison with 2.04, 3.0 includes many new features:

o	CrossDOS is included with the system and supports the high density
	floppies allowing access to 720K and 1.44 MB MS-DOS floppies.  A
	Commodity program is included to customize the behavior of
	CrossDOS.  It has worked flawlessly for me.

o	Support for AGA graphic modes.

o	Localization using the Locale preferences editor.  This is fun to
	play with.  You can select a country and language from the editor,
	and localized programs will display their menus, gadgets, and text
	in the selected language.  Not all of the programs in the OS are
	localized, but many are.  The timezone selector in the Locale editor
	is neat.

o	DataTypes are part of the OS.  This new facility allows programs to
	access data in an unlimited number of formats, as long as you
	install a datatype that understands the format.  An image viewer
	(for example) could be written that displays ANY graphics format
	(assuming you have a datatype for each format).  The great thing is
	that programmers can write new datatypes, thus extending the number
	of file formats supported.  This facility is very powerful.  All you
	software authors out there get busy writing datatypes!

o	MultiView is included.  This program is used to display any data-file
	that can be understood by an installed datatype.  When invoked,
	MultiView displays an ASL file requester.  Pick a file, and if you
	have an appropriate datatype installed, the file will be displayed.  

o	Interleaved bitmaps are now supported allowing faster screen updates.

o	The layers system has been speeded-up making window refresh faster.

o	Filesystems can be formatted with either OFS, FFS, or DCFS.  DCFS is
	a new Directory-Caching FileSystem that GREATLY speeds up directory
	reads from the floppy.  Very nice!  The Workbench Format program has
	check-boxes to allow you to pick the desired filesystem.  Format
	also has a nice status bar indicating the progress of the format.

o	The Palette preferences is brand new, and uses a "color wheel" for
	selecting colors.  It also allows selection of a variety of "pen"
	colors, used for various elements in the WorkBench.  It has an area
	at the bottom where you can see the various Workbench elements
	(gadgets, menus, window borders, etc) which allows you to see the
	effects of your color choices as you make them.  Nice!

o	You can use an IFF picture as a Workbench backdrop.

o	PostScript printer driver.  I don't have a PostScript printer so I
	haven't tried this driver yet.

	I'm sure that there are many other 3.0 software features that I've
neglected to mention. 

	Software compatibility seems good; all of my 'productivity' programs
work 100% (TurboText, SAS/C V6.0, VLT, WShell 2.0).  Some games do not run,
though there are tricks to make some of them work.  Most older games require
that you disable the CPU caches via the BootMenu.  Others have reported
additional successes by using utilities to copy the KickStart ROM to RAM.

DOCUMENTATION

	The A4000 comes with 5 user guides: "A4000", "ARexx", "AmigaDOS",
"Workbench 3.0", and "Amiga Hard Drives".  All of the manuals have a table
of contents and an index.  I'm pleased with the quality of the
documentation:  they seem well organized, complete, and make good use of
screen shots.  The manuals were produced on a "variety of Commodore systems."

	The A4000 guide covers setting up the system, opening the case,
installing additional RAM, installing cards, installing internal drives, and
troubleshooting problems.  It is very well done.  It is interesting to note
that in the section on upgrading the processor module, they mention have
instructions on upgrading a 68EC040 processor to the 68040.  Perhaps
Commodore had/has plans for selling a 68EC040 version of the A4000?

	The ARexx manual is a reference manual to the language.  It has
short sections at the start on setting up ARexx and explanations for a
handful of simple macros.  It documents ARexx instructions, functions, and
rexxsupport.library functions.

	The AmigaDOS manual is the largest of the lot.  It includes an intro
to AmigaDOS, a tutorial, a section on using the Shell, documentation of
AmigaDOS commands.  Appendices cover error messages, descriptions of various
system directories (EG DEVS:), and using AmigaDOS on a single floppy system.

	The Workbench 3.0 manual is fairly large and very complete.
Chapters include:  Before you Start, Basic Operations, Fundamentals of the
Workbench, Workbench, Preferences, Localization, CrossDOS, Fonts, Printers,
Other Workbench Programs, and the ED editor.  Appendices include:  Trouble
Shooting, Screen Display Modes, and Special Boot Options.

	The Amiga Hard Drives manual contains instructions for using a hard
drive, installing software, using HDToolBox, using HDBackup, as well as a
trouble shooting section.

	In addition to the manuals, you get a packet for registering your
A4000 for the 12 month warranty, a separate form to register for Commodore
Gold Service, a (non postage paid) Gold Service pre-addressed envelope, and
a brochure describing the optional 12-24 month extended Gold Service.  The
standard 12 month warranty card is postage paid.

	The final piece of documentation supplied was a Seagate booklet with
information on the drive... a nice touch.

A4000 AND MONITORS (NEC-3D)

	I decided to buy a NEC-3D monitor to use with my A4000.  I wasn't
overly impressed with the 1960 monitors I saw at the WOCA show.  The colors
on the 1960 didn't seem bright, and the A4000 screens didn't seem to fill
the whole monitor.

	The NEC-3D is a 14" monitor (actual screen space is about 13"
diagonal -- I hate how monitor companies try to fool people).  It can handle
all of the scan rates generated by the A4000.  It has controls on the front
panel for adjusting the vertical and horizontal position of the picture, the
vertical/horizontal size of the picture, and a "memory location" for storing
a predetermined combination of size/position.  It comes with a swivel base.
When purchased new, it has a 2 year warranty. 

	I was able to find a mail-order place in the Computer Shopper that
sells new NEC-3D monitors for $459.  The company is called USA-Flex and
their phone number in the USA is (800) 872-3539.  They allow returns on
merchandise for 15 days from receipt of the item, and they apply a 20%
restocking fee in these cases.  They sell a wide variety of new and
refurbished monitors including the Sony 1302 which handles all of the A4000
modes and which I'm told works quite nicely.

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  The NEC 3D has been discontinued by NEC, so it
	may be quite hard to find one.  So, I have included John's
	information about USA Flex since it may help some people.
	Neither the reviewer nor I are associated with USA Flex. - Dan]

	I do recommend getting a monitor that can handle all video modes of
the A4000.  The difficulty comes in locating a monitor that syncs down to
15Khz horizontal -- PCs don't require this frequency so it is rare to find
new monitors that can handle this frequency.  Older model monitors typically
can handle 15Khz as well as higher frequencies.  Of course, the 1960 can
handle all video modes of the A4000.  The NEC 3D was introduced several
years ago, so unlike the newer NECS (3FGx, 4FG, 5FG) it can handle 15Khz
output.  The NEC 3D price is also about $180 less then the prices I've seen
on the (newer) NEC 3FGx.

	When I first got my A4000 I tried hooking it up to a NEC 5FG, a
monitor which cannot sync down to 15KHz, as an experiment to see what would
happen.  Not surprisingly, the video image was blurred, distorted, and
impossible to read, but I could recognize that the computer was displaying
the "Please insert a bootable disk" animation.  On another try, I could see
that the Amiga was displaying a guru meditation.  After hooking the Amiga to
my NEC 3D, a monitor capable of synching at 15KHz, it booted just fine.  I
then went into ScreenMode preferences, selected a 31Khz mode as my default
WorkBench screen, hooked the Amiga back up to the NEC 5FG, and it booted
just fine.  The lesson to learn is that out of the box, the A4000 expects to
be connected to a monitor that can handle 15Khz video.  Once you get the
screenmode set up correctly you _can_ then use a 31Khz+ monitor.  I still
don't recommend it though, as the A4000 BootMenu is reported to require
15Khz output as well.

	[MODERATOR'S NOTE:  If you buy an A4000 and your monitor
	cannot handle 15KHz video, I suggest that you boot up the Amiga at
	your dealer's and set the ScreenMode preferences to a 31KHz mode
	before you take the Amiga home. - Dan]

	I'm generally pleased with my NEC 3D.  The colors are bright and the
crispness is very good.  My only complaint was that (like the 1960 monitors
I saw at WOCA) the video image did not fill the screen.  Note that this
problem is fixable (See below).

	When I first got my A4000, I had played with all of the possible
display modes and had chosen to use a 640x400 non-flicker screen as my
default Workbench screen.  Even if I used the overscan editor to enlarge my
screen to its maximum dimensions (676x467) the screen image did not fill the
monitor screen.  If I used the monitor controls to expand the image to its
maximum size I ended up with about 11" diagonal of usable screen space (7.5"
by 7.5").  I got the image to fill the screen vertically (though its a bit
squished) but not horizontally.  I had about a 1.5" margin of wasted space
on the left side of the image, and 1" on the right.  This was upsetting to
me, but the solution proved simple.  Copy the VGAOnly monitor file from
SYS:Storage/Monitors to DEVS:Monitors and reboot.  This greatly reduces the
amount of 'dead' space on the sides of the video image and produces a much
more proportioned screen.  After resetting my overscan to full size and
adjusting my monitor controls, I was very pleased.  Spencer Shanson of
Commodore suggested this fix on Usenet with the following explanation:

	>In order to smoothly move a display horizontally in the AA
	>productivity-type modes, such as multiscan, DblNTSC etc, requires
	>making each scan line slightly longer, and enabling the display
	>later in the line.  This pushes the display to the right, whilst
	>also squashing the line to fit a longer line in the same amount of
	>physical space"

	>If you can live without wider autoscrolling productivity type
	>screens, or you can live with the scrolling problem, then simply
	>copy the VGAOnly monitor from sys:storage/monitors to devs:monitors
	>and reboot.  The VGAOnly monitor is not really a monitor in the same
	>way that Super72, DblNTSC etc are, but is a flag to tell the system
	>what to do with the monitor sizes and positions when the monitors
	>are installed."
	>...
	>[Disclaimer]
	>All opinions expressed above are my own, and do not (necessarily)
	>represent those of Commodore.

	I believe that the 3000 allows a lot more overscan space.  I'd love
to expand my A4000 screen with more overscan but the limits seem strict.

	The A4000 comes with an adapter to allow standard 15 pin (multi-scan,
VGA) monitors to connect to the video port.  This adapter is pretty long
(maybe 2 inches) so you'll need some space behind the unit.

	Due to the flexibility of the Amiga video circuitry you can open
screens with wildly varying scan-rate requirements.  For example I could
have a 31Khz 640x400 screen open over a 15Khz NTSC screen.  When flipping
between screens of differing frequencies (EG using the screen depth gadget)
you will notice that the monitor screen goes black for a second or so before
displaying the new screen.  This is a normal artifact of multi-scan
monitors; they need a little time to re-sync to the new display frequency.
This happens on my PC at work as well and is just something to be aware of.

SUGGESTIONS FOR COMMODORE

	I would like it if Commodore would supply some picture files.
Workbench allows you to put a picture as a backdrop, but no pictures are
supplied.  I realize its an easy matter for most of us to locate some
picture files, but novice users might like to have some to play with out of
the box.

	Some sound samples should also be supplied.  Using the new Sound
preferences editor you can choose whether to have your Amiga screen flash,
beep, or play a sample.  Novice users would be very pleased to get some
simple sound samples to play with.

	My last wish is that Commodore would supply an online tutorial to
using the Amiga.  OS/2, Windows, and the Mac all supply a tutorial and I
think Commodore should as well.  Users hate to read manuals but often enjoy
interactive tutorials.

John Lindwall

---

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