Commodore Amiga 4000 Review/Overview (1992) - Using It Today 

Amigas were great, I worked for 5 years at Commodore Australia, my job was testing Software & Games on Amigas, I remember bring a A1200 home 6 mths before anyone new about it, the CEO told me, don't let any mate see it, & wink at me, I was also President of the Australian Amiga User Association & Sysop of their BBS AmiOZ they were great time, & I got paid to play with Amigas, my mates said I had the best job in the world. it was a sad day when we closed Commodore in the end.

it's great to see someone with dreams and passion reaching their goals. Respect!

Amiga 4000 was amazing technology. The fact it was used for sci-fi TV shows like Babylon 5 shows much good it was.

Super cool, man! Loving the live radio streaming function. Thanks for the time spent on these videos - I may be late to the party, but the appreciation is there.

This made me think about how quickly tower cases seemed to replace the desktop cases as the norm.

My first 5 years online was via Amiga, (never had a PC then) 040 & PPC and the BVision gfx card so you had the internet in HD. High online costs maybe but just amazing to communicate with fellow Amiga users back then (late 90's.) AmIRC, Voyager, Miami -> Altavista, and not a virus or popup in site, Ah the Joy!! I miss my BV! Just going threw cleaning my A3K keyboard at the moment (1 foot missing) cleaned and cleaned again with many household products and has been out in the sunlight for at least a month. I really need to bring the keys of the washing line also ;) Thanks for sharing and congrats on the A4K!

Great Video Dan, you're RU-vid videos are certainly ones that we can all watch and learn or recap a few things, so thank you very much pal. I really enjoy watching you're videos, Long Live Commodore.

I just don't understand why your subscriber base isn't more! Been watching for a couple of years and always get excited for one of your videos when it pops up on my homepage. Keep up the work!

Amazing system! Thanks for showing this. Ran into you at Replay 2014 a couple of weeks ago. Saw you at the bar. Really needed to say hi as I am always watching your Amiga videos and I very much appreciate those.

Wow, congrats on the insane deal! Nicely detailed and informative video as usual to boot.

Bought one of these for £100 in the early 2000's plus a Picasso IV card and various other hardware, but eventually I sold everything off as I didn't have space. Great machine. It was fast and responsive and the hardware was pretty forgiving. I used to create animations as a teenager and when I got this machine I created some really cool stuff - all on tiny amounts of ram (by modern standards). I read an article recently by Alan Kay - the average user today is just a consumer, but on the amiga you could be a creator (and it made sense). I loved its openness and flexibility.

It's such a beautiful machine and I love how well you're taking care of it; though I would love one of my own, I'm not sure I would be able to take as good care making sure it's components don't wear out. Thanks for sharing.

Lovely setup Dan and the native mode pass thru on the Picasso IV is a real bonus, saves a lot of hassle with extra monitors and stuff. It's my fave bit of kit.

The Amiga was it's time ahead. Visual and audio were superb. The grapics for Wings (of Fury), Pinball Dreams/Fantasies were much better than the online versions you can play now. Many games that you see now in your apple store, or google store are based on games from the Amiga and also the MSX (Panasonic) and Atari games. Miss the good old times.

hi Dan, congratulations on your purchase you fufilled your dream, i'm still after mine, the 4000 is the dream of every Amiga lover...i'll keep going with my (bought in 1994 but with more muscle now) Amiga 1200...

it always feels awesome to get a childhood dream finally. great machine mate

Always enjoy your videos. Thanks for the upload.

Congrats :) I remember counting up how many weeks it would take me to afford one on pocket money. It was around now infact.

if you ask me, Turrican II is one of the best games of all time, especially the Amiga version. The soundtrack is something truly special. Also, gotta love some Gloom Deluxe every now and then. And a whole bunch of other games.

Really good video Dan thanks for this, I remember reading in the mags about this legendary machine, it's links to Babylon5 etc etc. oh hope you have seen the upcoming Amiga book on kickstarter, I'm backing it, if you haven't take a look over there.

Wow hows that for future proof. A 1992 computer as latest tech. Commodore ads always said it was ahead of its time. Dontya love honest advertising.

Haven't even seen the video yet but I love your Amiga videos keep making them! I recently got myself an A4000 as well as it happens (060, CV64/3D and some other goodies) just sorting out a tower to rehouse it all which should be very soon :)

Very nice indeed :) I have a full mediator set up using a voodoo 3000 gfx card and i was blown away when i was looking at workbench in beautiful hi res colourful gfx.

I read that article and wanted the same machine. Good luck with the 4000

Amazing, Dan! Thanks for sharing! Such a dream machine! :) Have a great weekend!

Amazing Video. The story at the start brings the nostalgia of the day :)

This brings back so many memories, I was able to score an A4000/030 for UKP600 at a local shop in Bognor, around 93 and it was my main computer up through 2001...upgraded to a full 7 slot tower. I should never have sold it (around the time of the Pegasos II G4 )but alas time moves on. I'm back playing with Amigas now...mid-life Amiga crisis! :D

A couple of thoughts. That piggy back mains power socket for the monitor is switched with a relay, it doesn't put any additional load on the power supply, it's safe to use. Also, the IDE splitter is probably not needed. You can use a long single cable with inline connectors, like you have there already.

Nice Machine...reminds me of my old a4000, which I used as my main machine up until about 98/99. Had a 68060, the Cybervision64, a whopping 96MB Ram, 3gb hdd and a scsi cd-burner...was a hell of a machine at that time and lots of fond memories. For example I set it up so that the whole system got copied into the ramdisk at startup, so the system basically ran from the ram... Sadly the Mainboard broke, and it was almost impossible to get replacement in my area back than...at least not in an affordable pricerange, so I switched to Windows pcs after that. Thanks for bringing back some of those old memories.

Great video as usual Dan, loved every minute of it. Can't get enough of this sort of Amiga stuff. Was very shocked to see the big ram plus adds 256 megs!!!!! I have a 4000 somewhere with 040/40 and tons of cool boards. I think you should go PPC though and get the PPC graphics card, so much faster again ! :-)

Jealous! Would love to get my hands on a 4000. Great stuff mate. I had a 2000 growing up, which I adored. I keep hoping one pops up on Gumtree as I know how heavy those things are.

I just got my A4000 working the other day after 10 years of sitting in storage and the clock battery leaking (thankfully it didn't leak on to the motherboard). My former room mate owned it before I did and he gave that to me, as well as the A1200 with 68030 accelerator, the opalvision card, the Cybervision 64/3D with optional scandoubler, and mice and joysticks. A very nice machine, that A4000 is. I look forward to the day when I can get a 68060/PowerPC upgrade card for it

This beast has grown. Jesus it looks nice. This is a great video. Gonna have to come over and give you a casebadge if you dont have one yet.

Congratulations on your purchase, I am incredibly jealous.

It's a shame that all the uniqueness and originality has been washed out of the PC market. Outside of Apple, no one else is building anything that we look forward to or hope one day to get. All my PCs just blend together in my memory. But not my Amigas. Each one gives you something unique and, like you, I always wanted an Amiga. I finally got an Amiga Video Toaster, after 18 years. I don't dream about anything else the way I always dreamed that one day, I would get that. Fantastic video!

Do games run faster on this? I remember how slow some games were with Amiga 500. Do you get more fps on this? What games do you think had the most boost?

That is one fine computer, works nicely, congratulations!

Great video! It's amazing how sleek the Workbench looks compared to the OS X. It's a pity Commodore was mismanaged into the ground. I'd love to be on an AmigaBook Air. A three OS race versus the current Mac/Win would have speed up the innovation on all the systems.

Great Vid. Congrats on getting the Amiga you always wanted. It is really cool to see it online. Just think, though, if Commodore hadn't totally fumbled the ball, we'd all be using Amigas today.

What would be interesting would be a video about software development on the mid 90s Amigas. What are THE compilers to use, what are the most famous IDEs and editors. How can a porgrammer acess the unique possibilities of the machine (for example how to draw something on the screen by using the functions of the graphics chip).

Hey Dan Congrats on the A4000 a wicked cool machine. Thanks for all the great video's on the Amiga!

another great vid Dan. Would love one on getting your 4000 online.

Where do you keep all of this stuff??

I miss my Amiga 500 & 1200......:(

Awesome Video! please keep them coming.

8:00 There's no chance of overloading the power supply. The built in power brick in these things is just that - a power brick. The main switch turns them both on and off, but no power goes through the power supply to the monitor. It's perfectly safe to use, and you can even get splitters for these connectors to power other peripherals as well, such as printers and speakers. Very practical.

+Andrew Joy - If you're interested in keyboards, here's a nice geeky page about the Amiga's variants: deskthority.net/wiki/Amiga

Wow Amiga 4000 what a great computer and the modifications he's done with it well done

This is freaking awesome. Very very awesome. Well done.

Commodore was my first PC. It was passed down to me in 92, it was a couple of years old by then, so I don't remember exactly what model but obviously not the one referenced here. I cry when I remember the day I snobbishly ditched it for a custom built pc with a Pentium MMX and a turbo button. I wish I had kept it.

Hi there I'm david and I have to say I thoroughly enjoyed this video. I did my fair share of drooling over an amiga 4000, I've always wanted to do what you've done here and I find myself inspired to do so after seeing your video. I'm an IT administrator so I know what sort of work went into restoring this awesome machine. Can you fit a power pc board in there at all, I'd be really interested to see how that runs. I've subscribed to your channel and I'm looking forward to seeing more. Take care buddy and happy new year

I always wanted a miggy 4000 myself though could never afford one, had to settle for putting my A1200 in a tower case and upgrading with a 4xide splitter/buffer, blizzard 1260 50mhz 32gb fastram card, scandoubler, HD Floppy, CDRW and a wonderful A4000 keyboard. It may not have the graphics of the A4000 Picasso but its blisteringly fast running Workbench 3.9 and that 20+ year old computer could still teach microsoft windows a few tricks.Awesome you finally got you A4000 Dan , im well jel :-)

Hi Dan great video really enjoyed it. Good timing as well as I have been watching your videos for ages. I have a 600 that I still have from being a child but just brought a 4000 three weeks ago. Have been doing the obligatory battery clean up retrobrite and repairing the keyboard. Now need to choose and install an is and get it up running. It came with an opalvision graphics card which is OK but doesn't do rtg so have removed it. Cheers

Hi Dan, nice video - I've just restored an A4000/EC030 with an Emplant card in that I was given years ago, but due to moving house etc never got round to getting it working at the time. I did however have the sense to remove the clock battery before popping it into the loft. When I first got it, it would power on, but would endlessly re-set etc. In the end, all it took to get it working was removing all the boards/RAM/CPU card, cables etc, cleaning all the connectors with Deoxit (not cheap in the UK unfortunately), et voila - all working :-) I've upgraded to a CF HD, 16Mb of RAM, got an X-Surf100 from Vesalia and have just ordered a rapid road from Amigakit :-). Don't know if you know this or not, but you don't need to use your CD-Rom Audio mixer back plate on the 4000. It has a 3 pin Audio header (left, ground, right) on the back left of the Motherboard right next to the phono audio outs, that you can plug a CD-ROM audio out cable into. Anyway, just need to try getting a PicassoIV and an 040 or 060 card now, - not sure how I'm going to justify it too the missus though - She wasn't overly chuffed when I bought a Blizzard 1260 for my A1200.......

Beautiful piece of kit. I too dreamed of owning the Amiga 4000. Made do with my Amiga 500+ for many years back in the early 90's. Had a Philips RGB CRT monitor with stereo speakers too which really brought out the best in the games. I could never afford the A570 CD drive or hard disk which were also on my most wanted list. This is the sort of setup I would like to have in my man cave though!

what a beautiful machine! I always wanted one too, and reading how they made star trek and other programs with the video toaster, it was way ahead of it's time, and such a shame the way it turned out.

I had a 500, then a 2000 ... and then a 4000. I was so sad when commodore went under. I never owned a 3000, but I used them frequently ... very nice machine.

my chums and i undertook the project of putting our 500s in tower cases. to make it all look nice we needed 4000 keyboards, they were difficult to get hold of in 91 or whenever it was. and the job of desoldering the HDD port then resoldering it back on at a 90 degree angle so drives could go in the front of the tower was a bugger of a job. I also had the arexx Mac emulator, with the genuine Mac roms in it, it worked a treat but needed a Mac floppy drive as they used variable speed.

Brings back memories, I had a 4000 T '040 + the Picasso IV card, Unfortunately died due to a common problem

Nicely done video! Always was curious and envious of the Amiga back in the day (had an Apple IIc & IIGS). Found it funny that the iPhone 6 you were using to record the video has MPEG decoding built in the silicon somewhere taking microns of space yet the Amiga (and other computers of the era) needed an entire card/port for it ;) great times though!

Great find, great video !

Great vid as usual. In fact i am sure it was watching your videos last year that finally convinced me to get a A1200, flicker fixer and blizzard accelerator card. :) Any chance of some Amiga guides or tutorials? would love to finally learn octaMED. Back in the day 3D was more my thing, oh the time it took to render in imagine on my humble A500+

Thank you for all the Amiga videos you do. What exactly is that glue or sealant shown at 14:42 on this video? I was looking for the same thing to use it on my TV board.

Holy crap I had the same magazine by spring of 1993 I picked up a second hand /030 version for $750. Loved it.

I want one of those MPEG cards for my A4000! Nice!

I bought a A4000T when I got my first job in 1994 with a CyberGfx RTG card, Amiga multifrequency monitor, SCSI controller and a 68060 processor board. Fabulous machine, but somewhere in the mid 2000's it stopped booting and I stored it. Later I gave it away to someone who was planning to build a computer museum. Before the A4000T I only had a heavily upgraded A500 (68030 board, SCSI controller).

Another great video Dan! I still have a PIV and 060 in my tower. A4000 looks in nice condition, great for the cash outlay, hope the wife-to-be doesn't find out!! My wife still hasn't found out we have a 3TB Mirrored NAS box! lol

back in 1994 i have a 4000t and i have until 2000 back in that time my 4000t rule above my friends pcs,whit some bad ass upgrades of corse,long live to all amigas!!

First, I will say that I like this channel very much, keep up the good work I have just got my first A4000d that needs some love and maintenance. I see many using graphic cards in these, but is it necessary? is it so that I just got to use it in wb and some newer games? I have my old 1200 hooked up on television in the living room with RGB / SCART A4000 are also going to replace the 1200 in the living room hooked up to a LCDTV with scart so my question is, is there any point in using 400-500 £ on a graphics card?

Man, I remember(and probably still own) that issue of CU Amiga.

I had an AMIGA A4000/030... so many good memories

Even though these days there are probably smart toasters that are more powerful, just seeing the words 'Amiga 4000' again gave me a legit emotional rush. My reaction to it as some kind of unobtainable supercomputer, which I would only ever see in Amiga Format adverts and my dreams, is still instinctive to this day!

I picked up an A3000T a couple of years ago that had some nice goodies inside such as a Picasso IV, Concierto, maybe an accelerator, and a BNC style network card I've yet to look at to identify. The machine was supposed to be working but I couldn't get any video output out of either the Picasso or onboard on first try so shelved it until I'll have more time to muck with it. I was curious what exactly the Picasso could do so googled and found your video. It was very cool to see it has a built in flicker fixer with integrated pass through, very slick. I always liked the 3000 because of the flicker fixer but having a Picasso in an A4000 is probably the ultimate Amiga with flicker fixed AGA plus RTG. I picked up a stock A4000D/030 a couple of years before the A3000T that works well, so now after seeing this I want to get all these goodies in the A4000 as your video shows it can be the best of all worlds Amiga. Thanks for the inspiration!

This is also my dream machine, lucky you!

Hi @Dan Wood. How is your A4000 today? Any upgrades? Found an originak badge? Still using it? It would be great if you do a little follow up video over this one;);) Regards!

Dan, The switches for the amiga power supply are the same ones from old AT towers etc,they are readily available at electronics stores. The power supply you have is the skynet i think and they are very reliable and worth recapping. I have never seen one fail and take out any amiga boards,they usually quit or exhibit low voltages. The french amiga user COSMOS actually sells cap kits for them-check ebay or the forums

Nice video, awesome Amiga! I can see that some rather nice tools have been written over the years (SMB client, MP3 player). Never got to try networking. Well, i only had a 500 and a 1200/030 so there wasn't much in the way of expansion slots anyway. I used to buy the Aminet CDs to my 1200 (had the PCIMCIA CDROM), then in 94 i got access to the internet at work and downloaded tonnes of stuffs onto 720kb PC disks and transferred the stuff with CrossPC. We used to import CU Amiga to Sweden because there were not many Commodore magazines here. Datormagazin was the exception. Would love to get my hands on a 3000 or a 4000 (even a 030) and then play around with networking and EMPLANT (which i suspect can be hard to find), given that i can find an old version of MacOS that runs well. Still got Win 3.11/95 so that's sorted. Thanks for showing what you can do today with the platform.

CU Amiga is my favourite mag! Ive got the entire collection in my shed still, along with amiga active, and Amiga format. I have an advert in the Quake edition for my bulletin board I ran. IT was called Amiga Forever. I should sue collanto lol!

love your A4000, dude! Question: Do you have any idea if I could have a batterie cell as you have on your 4000 mounted/soldered to a standard A500 board instead of the barrel ton (blue) which tends to leak? And how would I do that? That would be terrific Thx, Marqus

Great piece of hardware and great video ! It seems very easy and fast to launch any game from your hard drive, great (but expensive) way to bypass emulation.

Ah brings back memories, bought one about 93 from a computer show in London for £1200

Hi Dan, did you know that there's a header on the A4K mobo near the audio connectors, where you can attach your cd-rom audio cable to get it mixed with amiga audio? That way you don't need the audio cabling mess at the back..

Respect! Amiga 4000 its the computer of my dream

Hey Dan, I was after a bit of advice... I really love watching your Amiga videos, this was my childhood as well as my Dad's, he gave me his 1200 when I was 8, and after I was upgraded to PSX, I've wanted to have a snazzy high end Amiga for genuine all-purpose use, like internet etc... What is your recommendation? :)

25mhz. Damn that's fast. I had a C128D. Glorious steel cased commodore. Miss it so much..... And my stack of Loadstar disks

Interesting video, very enjoyable. I also recently got an Amiga A4000 and pretty much have the same setup as you but minus the MP3 decoder thing. It's away being recapped and having the buster 11 fitted at the moment as I had issues with the PIV hanging the system in Zorro III mode, worked in Zorro II mode for some odd reason. Do you have issues with games not scrolling smoothly with the PIV? I'm really fussy about stuff like that I do like my smooth scrolling and note that the A4000 with PIV Is not as smooth as the a1200. anyway nice machine there mate, perhaps we could have a follow up vid once you have done the psu mod?

Hi Dan. Do you have any info & advice/experience, using an Amiga, specifically, an A1200 or A600, as a DHCP server and/or hardware firewall? I have a good ol' A1200 with 3.1 ROMS, that I'd like to see a use for. Haven't used the old girl, in a while, as it's quite expensive for modern-made upgrades. E.g. the FastATA controller is better part of 90 quid!! I'd rather stick to as close as stock as possible.

Great video :) instead of all that audio stuff on the back and taking up a slot, maybe run a single cable from the audio mix header on the m/b out the back of the case for that CD and then just plug your amplifier into the normal Amiga audio?

Dan, just FYI if you increase the resolution it does actually slow down the system more, just because you have a graphics card doesn't mean this doesn't happen. The system bus still needs to pass the extra data to the frame buffer (card) which causes slow down with the more resolution you push.

Great video! I live in the United States, and I would love to own an Amiga for gaming! I should check out Amibay and see if there's anyone else on there from the States.

Never knew the amiga 4000 ever existed...pretty cool stuff

way back I made a parnet cable and connected my 500 and 2000 was a lot of fun

Great stuff. I own an A4000T with 060 cyberstorm, but no other expansion cards. Bit bulky but that was my dream machine so, im happy. Tbh i mostly use my A500 with gotek and the cd32 i just keep the A4000T out of too much activity !

Great video on a great machine. Did you wind up building the 060 card yet? I just ordered a couple of the kits to assemble myself. I'm hoping to make good use of one on my 4000 for wdhd load

I saw a Cool World promo on that back of that magazine. That brings back memories. Brad Pitt in a adult cartoon. ❤️ The 90s

great video

The Gift! Great track.

Wow Dan just wow. I am so so jealous, you know own the computer I am been lusting after for the last 20 years. What a greta price you paid also, every time I look people are after £600 plus for a basic machine, by the time I would be done buying goodies for it the total takes me into iMac range. I can not justify spending that kind of cash on a 20 year old machine. It is not just the 4000's but all the big box Amigas that are going up in price every year. I am sure one day I will own my very own 4000 beast it is just a shame that day is not today.

I bought A4000/40 back in 1993. It was about 1 month delivery time. Price with C= 1942 monitor and 120MB hard drive was ~18900FIM. Sadly i had to sell it due to bad financial situation few years later. :( Luckily i took full backup of the system before i sold it. It works like a charm on fs-uae. Hopefully some day i get my hands on real A4000.

I still have a Amiga 1200T 060 elbox voodoo card and so on in my shed. Still working order.