Multisync madness
The bummer news of the day for prospective A4000 owners is for those of us who own "multisync" monitors which won't sync to a 15 KHz vertical scan rate: sell your beloved Trinitrons with your A3000s, they won't work with an A4000. Since there is no de-interlacer, when you run a bootable game from floppy, for instance, the ECS-compatible modes will scan at 15 KHz, giving you fits. In fact, even "software error" (guru) messages will come up at 15 KHz scan rates. At the end of the day, it's probably just not worth the trouble.

In fact, I may even have to bite the bullet here and recommend buying Commodore's own (heinously expensive) 1960 monitor.

Of course, it was a smug Commodore rep who pointed this fact out to me, with a 12-bit sound card blaring annoying music from the A4000 in the background.

Though you could buy other decent monitors that will scan down to 15KHz, you never know for sure whether or not there will be an annoying black border around the screen in some video modes (as I learned with my Mitsubishi Diamond Scan). Of course, it was a smug Commodore rep who pointed this fact out to me, with a 12-bit sound card blaring annoying music from the A4000 in the background.

Short of buying a killer-whizzo programmable monitor, the 1960, with its .28mm dot-pitch, is probably your best bet. Still, all is not lost. With the 1960 you get to see the glorious super-high-res-interlaced HAM8 mode, with 262,144 colors in 1500x480 resolution and a perfect HAM aspect ratio (pixels taller than they are wide, which kills fringing). On top of that, I plan to buy a VCR eventually, so I can watch TV and movies on it when I'm not using my computer. Besides, the 4000 shouldn't need a single-frame controller to put animations on videotape, since it can do everything in real-time. Toast that.

Star of the show: Amiga 1200
Though the 4000 was interesting to me, the real star of the show here was unquestionably the A1200. With its 68020 processor at 14Mhz, 32-bit data paths and instruction cache, Commodore claims that this Amiga's raw processing power should be about 5 times that of the A600. Having used the machine, I believe them. Add the AA chipset to the equation and this A3000/16Mhz owner will hang his head in shame. With 2Mb of chip RAM standard, the 1200 brings the Amiga range into a new era, where productivity software and even games can push these new custom chips far beyond the original Amigas. The machine's 880Kb floppy drive is viewed as unimportant by most game developers simply because they see CD as the wave of the future. Thus, Commodore chose to add an extra meg of RAM as standard and skimp on the floppy drive.

Given the low price the 1200 has started out at, and some of the CD stuff I saw from both Commodore and Philips, I have a hard time finding fault. With the new standards for speed and graphic power, the A1200 easily rivals 386DX/25Mhz Pee Cee systems--at least until you price them, then Commodore leaves the Asian cloners scrambling to compete. Add the fabulous AmigaDOS Release 3 and that slick new mouse, and the 1200 looks like it's in it for the long haul. With its IDE interface, cheap 2.5" hard drives should find their way into most 1200s eventually, maybe even right off the bat. The rumored A670 CD-ROM drive for the 600's PCMCIA slot should probably work just fine with the 1200, as well. Commodore seems to have hit one out of the park here, if that's possible in a country deprived of baseball.