The Amiga 2000 was the first "big box" Amiga — full of new Zorro II expansion slots and a video slot. Introduced in 1986, it was later replaced by more advanced models. The Amiga 2000 was the first Amiga with Kickstart in ROM chips — no more Kickstart disk needed for booting. It shipped with Kickstart 1.2 — the latest version at the time.

Amiga 2000 Motherboard — Commodore's big box

This Amiga 2000 motherboard was designed by a Commodore team. About 60,000 Amiga 2000 units were sold with this original board. It was soon replaced by a "cost-reduced" version designed by Commodore USA and Dave Haynie. However, the original layout — slot positions, ports, connectors — was preserved in the new model.

The German Model

The German Amiga 2000 was based on the Amiga 1000. In fact, this model was just an Amiga 1000 integrated with a conceptual Zorro II Backplane on a single motherboard. So it inherited most Amiga 1000 features.

This Amiga used the same DIP Agnus — thin — chip as the Amiga 1000, so there was no option to upgrade to 1 or 2MB of chip RAM. The early Amiga 2000 also had no Gary chip but used discrete logic instead, and used a PAL-based approach for Zorro II access arbitration rather than the Buster chip.

The German Amiga 2000 was of higher quality compared to later motherboards — featuring a four-layer PCB design versus the two-layer design used in US models. Part of the "cost reduction" approach was due to the change to two-layer circuit production, and another part was integrating higher circuits into dedicated chips. Gary functions — address decoding, bus control, floppy motor control, reset — Buster — Zorro II bus control — and Fat Agnus — DRAM controller — were implemented in expensive discrete logic in the original version, just like the Amiga 1000.

But the early Amiga 2000 had major weaknesses compared to the advanced American model:

Notably, many early Amiga 2000 systems shipped with Cherry keyboards — small function keys, red Amiga keys — with Philips MCUs instead of MOS 657x chips. These keyboards typically don't work with PC keyboard adapters.

The American Version

The second Amiga 2000 was full of Zorro II expansion slots and a video slot. This version was first built under Dave Haynie's supervision, designed based on the Amiga 500. If the German Amiga 2000 followed the Amiga 1000, the second version was based on the Amiga 500. This version was released in 1987, underwent many revisions, and production stopped in 1991.

This model looked identical to the first externally and shared features like Kickstart in ROM chips. This version and all later revisions were based on the Amiga 500 design. This computer was the foundation of many professional activities — especially when paired with the Video Toaster expansion card, accelerator card, and Lightwave 3D software.

The Amiga 2000 was also the base for several different models: the Amiga 1500 — British variant with two floppy drives and no hard disk — the Amiga 2000HD — with A2091 SCSI card and SCSI hard drive — and the Amiga 2500 — with A2620 CPU accelerator card for the 2500/20 or A2630 for the 2500/30.

The Amiga 2000 was a highly efficient video workstation used for high-quality video production. Many film titles and TV commercials were created using this powerful Amiga model.

Revisions and Derivatives

The Amiga 2000 had numerous revisions and derivatives. The Amiga 2000HD shipped standard with A2090 or A2091 SCSI interface card and Quantum hard disk. The Amiga 2500 had a hard disk and A2620 or A2630 accelerator card. The Amiga 2500 Unix was a version for the Unix workstation market, shipped with Commodore Unix instead of Workbench. The Amiga 1500 was an Amiga 2000 renamed by Commodore UK and sold with two 3.5-inch floppy drives as standard.

In 1989, a project was started to create a version of the Amiga 2000 that included the A2091 hard disk controller and 68030 processor from the A2630 on the motherboard — essentially a lower-cost A2500. However, in the meantime Dave Haynie had developed Zorro III — a new and improved expansion bus far superior to Zorro II and ISA buses. This advancement enabled the creation of a completely new Amiga. The next year, the Amiga 3000 was launched.