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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
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When Escom bought the Amiga in 1995 many Amiga users expressed a concern that they had just bought it for the Commodore patents and were uninterested in the Amiga itself. These worries were laid to rest when Escom announced a range of systems based upon the Commodore and Amiga technology. Here are some of the projects that were announced between 1995 and 1996.

Amiga 600- One of the first systems to be announced was the return of the A600. This would have been aimed at the extreme low-end of the market. They quickly realised that it would cost a great deal to restart production and divide the market.

Amiga 1200- Amiga Technologies first priority was to bring the existing Amiga technology to the market. This led to the release of the A1200. Apart from using a different brand of floppy disk (it is actually a PC high density unit that has been tailored to work with the Amiga) and a new logo on the case, there is little difference from the original A1200.

Amiga 4000T- Only 1000 A4000T were made before Commodore went into liquidation, making this the first new Amiga.

Amiga CD32- Amiga Technologies were adamant that the CD32 would eventually make a comeback, stating their intention to use it as the basis for a low cost platform. This would have been sold directly, as well as licensed to cable and on-line entertainment and information companies to use as TV set-top boxes. General Manager, Petro Tyschtschenko suggested the original model would be back on the shelves by Christmas 1995. Manfred Schmitt was less optimistic, indicating that increased competition from the recently launch Sony Playstation would require the CD32 to be redesigned and uprate the system specs in order to make it more appealing to the console market. Target dates for the updated CD32 placed its release sometime towards the end of 1996.

Commodore 64- Under license from Escom, Tianjin Family-Used Multimedia Co. Ltd were planning to revive the Commodore 64 for sale in East Europe.

Power Amiga- The launch of the PowerMAC led many Amiga devotees to demand the Amiga take a similar path. When Amiga Technologies were set up they took time to evaluate the previous decisions that had been made by Commodore regarding the RISC-based Amiga. Rather than use the HP-RISC that Commodore had chosen, Amiga Technologies announced the PowerPC to be more viable at the time. The only real information on the system comes from a press release issued towards the end of 1995. Like the Amiga MCC system, the Power Amiga would be jointly developed between a dozen companies in close partnership with Amiga Technologies GmbH. The development of the RISC-based AmigaOS was planned to be created internally at Amiga Technologies, with a number of Commodore engineers, most notably Dave Haynie being hired. The Power Amiga was due for release during the first quarter of 1997.

Read the Press release

Encapsulated Amiga Environments- A precursor to the InsideOut card. The EAE would have been a hardware-based emulator for the Intel PC and Mac platforms.

Omnibox- Talks were held between Omnibox (a Connecticut-based company) and Amiga Technologies. They were mentioned in the same paragraph as Viscorp leading to the belief that they may also have been producing an Amiga set-top box.

Portable AmigaDOS- Plans were made for porting the AmigaOS to a range of "non-Amiga platforms". Compatibility may have relied on the EAE card. Only the PowerPC port made it past the conceptual stage, although it is possible that AmigaOS ports to other hardware architectures would have been on the cards for development after the PPC AmigaOS was released.

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