COMPONENTS OF THE AMIGA These are the hardware components of the Amiga: o Motorola MC68000 16/32 bit main processor. The Amiga also supports the 68010, 68020, and 68030 processors as an option. o 512K bytes of internal RAM, expandable to 1 MB on the A500 and A2000. o 256K bytes of ROM containing a real time, multitasking operating system with sound, graphics, and animation support routines. o Built-in 3.5 inch double sided disk drive. o Expansion disk port for connecting up to three additional disk drives, which may be either 3.5 inch or 5.25 inch, double sided. o Fully programmable RS-232-C serial port. o Fully programmable parallel port. o Two button opto-mechanical mouse.
o Two reconfigurable controller ports (for mice, joysticks, light pens, paddles, or custom controllers). o A professional keyboard with numeric keypad, 10 function keys, and cursor keys. A variety of international keyboards are also supported. o Ports for simultaneous composite video, and analog or digital RGB output. o Ports for left and right stereo audio from four special purpose audio channels. o Expansion options that allow you to add RAM, additional disk drives (floppy or hard), peripherals, or co-processors. THE MC6X000 AND THE AMIGA CUSTOM CHIPS The Motorola 68000 is a 16/32 bit microprocessor. The system clock speed for NTSC Amiga’s is 7.15909 megahertz (PAL 7.09379 MHz).
These speeds may vary when using an external system clock, such as from a genlock. The 68000 has an address space of 16 megabytes. In the Amiga, the 68000 can address over 8 megabytes of continuous random access memory (RAM). - 2 Introduction -