The first Amiga 2500 model was released during 1989 and was most popular in the US and Canada, appealing to the high-end user and professional market. There was very little difference from previous revisions of the A2000, the most notable being the addition of processor cards increasing the system speed.
First models were sold with A2620 card (68020 processor + 68881 FPU), next with A2630 (68030 + 6882)
Armando Ruggeri, from Canada, adds:
This machine was sold in much greater numbers as the A2500HD which shipped with the much unliked A2090A ST506/SCSI HD controller which later was replaced with the much better A2091 SCSI controller, typical sizes of the HDs were 40 - 80 Mb HD as I recall. The main reason to buy this machine was for the A2620 or 2630 accelerator cards that were plugged into the fast CPU slot. The 2620 included a 14Mhz clocked Motorola 68020 CPU, 68881 FPU and 68851 MMU. It included 2Mb of 32bit Fast RAM expandable to 4Mb RAM if you were handy with a soldering iron and felt comfortable handling the uniquely packaged fragile ZIP (Zigzag Inline Package) chips! :)
This resulted in a 3X speed increase and much more if you had math intensive packages such as 3D graphics packages IE: Turbo Silver etc..
Later onwards The A2620 was replaced with the faster A2630 which included a 25Mhz Motorola 68030 (With integrated MMU) and the much faster 68882 FPU, this combo could increase general speeds to 6X stock A2000 speeds. This board also shipped with 2Mb of 32 fast RAM or special ordered with 4Mb. Like the A2620 the 2Mb board could be upgraded by soldering in 16 ZIP chips, which usually was done by authorized service centers.
The two accelerator boards were both sold seperately for upgrading A2000/A2000HDs to the identical A2500 speeds. The price for these boards were extravegant at first with the first A2620 retailing in the $5000 Canadian dollars range on their release!
Later on the boards became less popular as third party products from companies like GVP included faster performance, built in HD controler and much easier to expand memory systems.
Paul Gable specifies:
There was a board made by DKB called the 2632 which attached to the back of a 2630 and added up to 128 megs of RAM. This board is extremely rare.
Please consider donating your old computer / videogame system to Old-Computers.com or one of our partners from anywhere in the world (Europe, America, Asia, etc.).
Amiga 2500 with proccesador Motorola 68020. Good machine and vintage $)
I still have my Amiga 2500, as well as the probably the last motherboard in existence after Commodore went bankrupt. Unfortunately my Amiga monitor I had from an Amiga 1000 died and I never tried to replace it.
Saturday 30th April 2022
David Kavanaugh (United States)
I have a color pic of a 2500
Thursday 29th September 2016
Brian (USA)
NAME
AMIGA 2500
MANUFACTURER
Commodore
TYPE
Professional Computer
ORIGIN
U.S.A.
YEAR
1989
BUILT IN LANGUAGE
None
KEYBOARD
Full stroke 96 keys with 10 function keys, numeric keypad and cursor keys
CPU
68000 + 68020 then 68030
SPEED
7.14 MHz (68000), 14 MHz (68020), 25 MHz (68030)
CO-PROCESSOR
68881 then 68882 + standard Amiga 2000 custom chips
RAM
3 MB up to 9 MB
ROM
256 KB (DOS 1.3)
TEXT MODES
60 or 80 chars x 32 lines
GRAPHIC MODES
320 x 256 / 320 x 512 / 640 x 256 / 640 x 512 dots
COLORS
32 (for 320 x X modes), 16 (for 640 x X modes) among 4096 + 2 special modes EHB (64 colors) + HAM (4096 colors)
SOUND
4 voice 8 bit PCM
I/O PORTS
4 PC ISA slots (2 AT & 2 XT), Processor card slot, 5 x Zorro II slots, Video slot, Serial/RS232, Parallel/Centronics, RGB & composite video outputs, Mouse, 2 x Stereo audio, Keyboard, External floppy
BUILT IN MEDIA
3.5'' disk-drive (880k) + 40 MB SCSI hard disc in basic version
(France, 1990, 68030 version)
