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This is an a1500
and this, this is an A1500
and you guessed it this is also in A1500
Three machines with the same name
there must be a story to be told, the story of the Amiga 1500
our story begins with the Amiga 1000 a machine byte magazine called the first
multimedia computer, so far ahead of his time that almost nobody could fully
articulate what it was for exactly Commodores marketing department included
it retailed over 1200 US dollars in 1985 and was sold exclusively in computer
stores to try and distance itself from the toy store image of the Commodore 64
and make inroads into the serious business PC market which Commodore
wanted a larger slice of than his current systems could deliver
In 1987 Commodore condensed the A1000 into its new low-end model machine which would
succeed the c64 it was the a500 and they would double down on their business
efforts with the A2000. Amiga ownership began for me like many others
with the a 500 its wedge-shaped form-factor sliding neatly beneath a TV
set or monitor and opening up a world of 16-bit software at a more affordable
price than its bigger brother. The A500 came in at 699 u.s. dollars 499 pounds
here in the UK and that price would drop over the years. The a500 capabilities
coupled with its low price of entry and friendly form factor meant that it
didn't take long for it to be heavily associated with gaming. Commodore took
advantage of that fact by bundling it with software to appeal to gamers like
the screen gems, batman or cartoon capers packs with a little productivity
software tossed in like deluxe paint to appease the parents. This would be both a
curse and a blessing for the Amiga which had sold over 1.5 million units in the
UK by 1993 sales were good but businesses often turn their noses up at
the Amiga considering it first and foremost to be a games machine. Commodore
may argue this fact and they did aim marketing out the business sector but in
the UK especially commodore were pushing games heavily in those a500 packs and to
be fair the amiga excelled at many things and games certainly was one of
them but it was within this mindset that a small start-up company saw the seed of
opportunity to provide a low-cost Amiga in a desktop form factor that might
tempt businesses to take the Amiga more seriously at a lower price and therefore
risk that company was checkmate Digital limited
this is Steven Jones of checkmate digital in 1989 Steven partnered with
James Campbell to sell the checkmate a 1500 and he explains to us here why they
thought the a 1500 should exist (Stephen) ...We then setup Checkmate Digital with the express aim of launching this
case, now, the reason for the case you can see the picture up here, why was it so
important, or in my mind why was it so important, and the designers etc. Well the the
2000 was a fantastic machine but it was really expensive back then and I
think we're talking '87 '88, and initially came out it was very very
expensive for normal users. For businesses it was fine...
...A lot of people had Amigas who wanted to get into the
professional end. Not everyone was playing games people weren't playing
games, it was all about creating graphics, creating music, creating all this
you know, even desktop publishing, trying to use your Amiga to get a new career and
there was lots of people out there who bought their five hundreds, they had
invested in them, they bought a hard drive or they bought bits and pieces for it, extra
floppy disks and they'd expand it, but they wanted to give it a
bit more, and there were an awful lot 500 owners, it was designed so you can put
the Amiga 500 motherboard in there you could put an extra floppy disk in, you
could put... it had an internal expansion slot which was a Zorro Two or an
eighty-six way connector, and you could put in it a hard drive controller
and RAM, we used to put in the GBP SCSI HCA - I'm getting a bit technical here - great cards but the
big full-length cards, we used to cut them in half because one half was all the electronics
and the other half was literally just tracks to a 25 way connector
so we used to chop that off and then stick them inside, so that had
up to 8 meg of RAM and a very fast SCSI controller and of course
then you can mount the hard drive behind this panel here so you had
the internal hard drive, you had 8 meg of RAM, you had everything inside this
case and and some people were rack mounting them as well, and giving
it the external keyboard yes I mean I like the external keyboards, I've always
liked big box Amigas, but it allowed other things, for example
you could put MIDI interface inside the case, we also had an adapter so you could
put inside a Flicker Fixer there was tons of things and on top of that you could
put in a Mega Midget Racer which is 68030 card inside with a fan at the back
and it was a fantastic device
a fantastic device indeed an amiga that's more flexible than a standard 500
and cheaper than a 2000 by up to half the price with the right upgrades you
could create the ultimate Amiga on a budget
they cheekily named their invention the checkmate a 1500 system leaving no doubt
to potential buyers as to where it sat in the hierarchy of Commodores product
lineup, and if you weren't one for DIY then you could buy the kit fully assembled
with an A500 and your choice of optional extras already fitted by
checkmate just like the A2000 the joystick and
mouse ports were accessible from the front and an external keyboard was
included but that was actually the a500 keyboard transplanted into an external
casing. After a period of promotion the A1500 was launched in 1990 for the price of
200 pounds and it quickly became apparent that the pre-built systems were
a popular choice the donor machines for which had to come from somewhere (Stephen)... and we
used to buy the games packs, Dave Pleasance was great at marketing games machines basically, he really was the one who pushed the Amiga
and we really were the ones to benefit from the because the price came down, so we used to buy boxes and get loads of these
I think I remember the Batman packs and those early packs, and we used to buy them
and then just just strip them apart, and then in the corner we'd have
the old cases, now a-days just a box would be worth money, but all
the boxes in the corner, with all the game stacked up games and like DPaint and so on
we used to throw DPaint and stuff in with it, but the games
used to get thrown away...well not thrown away I don't know what happened to the games,
but, so yeah we used to just take them and the cases were kind of left behind,
left behind so everything used to go in here and also the keyboard went in here
so you'd end up with just a plastic case, so that was quite funny.
And so the checkmate digital a 1500 was on the market and shifted over 400 units before
they hit a challenging situation and our next system played a big part in that.
Enter Commodore and why not they had after all created the Amiga this was
their baby he hadn't passed them by that this a 1500 product was reviewing well
in magazines being advertised heavily and likely selling well so they invited
Stephen to visit them and discuss the product Stephen recounts what happened
next. (Stephen)...James and I thought wow this is good, because what we
were trying to do was, we were not selling games machines
we never advertised as a games machine, we only ever sold it as a professional bit kit and we used to do
the professional shows we used to go to shows, and we would have for example one
of these machines sitting there running X CAD to people who were looking at auto
cad etc on a PC and showing them the benefits, we went to a music show where
we showed the Amiga as a music system connected to the keyboards by
MIDI etc so we was doing that kind of promotion we thought well maybe this
would be really useful and so we decided to have to make a good impression and
James had a black Porsche Turbo which I was always jealous of and we
decided that okay we'll make an impression because it tended to be most
people in the computer business were, you know like a bit flashy so James said
right we'll go and buy me a suit because I didn't have a suit at the time, we went down and bought quite a nice suit
Austin Reed if I remember rightly
and got me insured on the Porsche Turbo for the day which was amazing, and so it took a
bit longer than normal to get to there because I was taking lots of detours
but anyway so I got to Commodore and I thought it would be worth
making a little bit of an entrance so I roared into the car park, and it was a
wet and the tail had been kicking out on the way I
was having a whale of a time, roared in there revved the engine a bit, turned it off and walked in, went into the meeting
sat down and once the pleasantries are out of the way
the discussion came up, and I don't remember the exact words, I remember the key bits
but I don't remember the exact words that were said because it was so long ago, but basically it was we're causing
Commodore a problem, and they're gonna get rid of us, and a few interesting choice
words. and I was.."what?".. I was really shocked but and that was the bottom line it was
a quite short meeting, I thought they were gonna say you know like we maybe we
could do something do this high-end promotion to help them
promotion because we were doing reasonably well, but the interesting thing was that
they thought we were selling thousands of these we were selling hundreds but we
wasn't selling thousands and they thought we were affecting their market
and of course you know because we are buying 500's their margins are very low and I
kind of understand it, but yeah so that that was that meeting... and it was
interesting anyway I left, very disappointed putting it mildly and
interestingly after that though the
they wanted to get they want to get rid of us but actually all they had to do was
what they did about a couple months later on, they launched the Commodore
1500 because they never liked us using the number which is fair enough
but they launched the Commodore 1500, they slashed the price to 999 pounds, that was it.
wanting to crush rather than collaborate with checkmate
Commodore releases this the Commodore A1500 significantly closing the price gap
to the checkmate A1500 while carrying the official Commodore marquee and this
model was only for the UK market you wouldn't see the A1500 anywhere else it
was purely a reaction to checkmate Commodore obviously hadn't designed and
released a brand new machine in the space of just a few months with which to
attack checkmate no they'd hastily added stickers to the
manuals like this and the wonky badge on the front does give us a clue as to the
machines real origins but it's the label on the back that really gives the game
away that's right this is actually an Amiga 2000
repackaged under the 1500 name if we take a look inside it reveals a B2000
motherboard that's the most common type of board found in 2000's with the
original aA200 board being more closely aligned to the A1000 chipset, I guess
what makes this in A1500 is not what's here but what's missing the hard disk
controller and hard disks of the 2000 have been removed in favor of two floppy
disk drives leaving our hard disk activity light here disconnected and unloved
everything else though is exactly the same as in a 2000 including the five Zorro II
slots on the motherboard and space for two hard drives and the original sticker
is actually still present under the a 1500 one so if you added two hard drives
in a controller you could peel off the sticker and you've got a legitimate
A2000 the price of the commodore machine soon dropped from 999 to 949 pounds with
a monitor and my example was originally purchased for 600 pounds without a
monitor to me that seems the sensible choice compared to a similarly priced
checkmate case and an a 500 to install inside it. the effort gone to by
Commodore to eradicate what it perceived as a threat was a little extreme though
when you consider that within a few months by august 1990 the new amiga 3000
was announced and naturally potential business buyers wanted to see what the
new technology of the a 3000 would offer and at what
price, perhaps then this was just another of the many poor business decisions made
by Commodore or perhaps it was the correct thing to do but for Stephen, James
and Checkmate it was the end so the real impact of the
Commodore 1500, pretty much wiped us out, as I said our benefit was we
could take a 500, if you already had 500 it was still worth buying, but if you were
gonna buy a complete machine whereas before you saved an awful lot of money,
hundreds of pounds, building one of these because most people just wanted a hard
drive RAM and accelerator card, maybe a flicker fixer, didn't really want much more
so we were good value proposition over the two thousands, probably 750 pound
cheaper, so it was a good value proposition but as soon as the
Commodore 1500 came out that was slashed so that was an instant death knell
you'd be forgiven for thinking that our story ends here
a small agile company seizes an opportunity the big boys catch up and
spoil the fun for them and technology marches on rendering both projects
redundant but the march of technology is precisely why the A1500 lives on to
this very day, technology like the modern tools available to Stephen today and the
website Kickstarter this is the first prototype of the new checkmate A1500
Plus, a desktop case which takes the goals of the original checkmate A1500 to
extremes and it takes styling cues from what many will consider to be the
best-looking Amiga, the case is designed to house everything from a regular PC to
a Raspberry Pi and of course those original Amiga 500 to 600 and even 1200
motherboards with optional extras to suit every configuration, here's Stephen to
explain more (Stephen)... I didn't want to remake the original design, I wanted to start from scratch, and so I gave it some thought
now here was the key thing for me, and some people hah some people have moaned at me about doing this and some people have agreed with me
My favourite computer is the 3000 , I love the 3000, I also love the 1000 and I love the way
with 1000 you've got this garage so you know you can slide your keyboard underneath it, I love that, but I love the look of the 3000, the front
and I thought well why not design a case that has the look of a 3000, now think of it more like
a new Mini that's the best way of putting it, it's nothing
like the original, bigger, slightly different proportions and so on, it does more OK
and so I thought well you know I'll have a play and I did some design work and
I thought well you know, no ones going to be interested anyway, so just for fun
I designed it up, and as you can see if you just look at that case, most Amiga
users will go "oh that's the 3000", yeah instantly we just go it's the 3000 because
its got the overall look of the 3000 but if you compare it to that one back there
its' a bit wider... so these are these are two removable panels and they come in
various shapes and sizes so basically you have you have this one here for
example that can take an Amiga floppy disk, now I've got
the drive in here but it's actually not connected because I'm running an Intel
Atom board in here and it obviously doesn't read my floppy disks, but I put it
here to show the mechanics so you just put that in there stick that in
there and a floppy disk works, out it comes, you might want to CD ROM
drive...there you go so there's a cd-rom drive
gone in there little slimline one, I have a holder that holds the thing in
place, you can put a full-size drive so just a normal you can fit one of these
and slide it in, the other thing about it it is that inside the case we have this
board, now the the case was designed to, see the original one would only take a
500 motherboard which was you know at the time he didn't matter obviously because
there wasn't really anything else you could put in it, but now a-days we have all kinds of motherboards we
well from the Amiga it will take a 500 motherboard, it
will take a 1200 motherboard it will take a 600 motherboard it will take a
mini ITX motherboard it will take a micro ATX motherboard, and...now
mini ITX means it will take Amy-ITX it will take the board 1222 when that's
completed, but if you've got a 500, now to me the 500 always the important one
because you know it's the - the original one, so when the version 2 comes out then
this board is going to go inside, now the other thing about it is it has an what's
called an SFX power supply in the back of the case there's this tiny little
power supply which this one's 300 watts which is more than enough for any Amiga
but they come in 450, 600 and so on so you can put in a very high power PC you
can even on the new version you could fit a water cooling block for
the CPU in it and a very high end GPU etc so it will actually take quite a lot
the only reason for the Kickstarter is because of these front panels because
these are 3d printed they cost about hundred seventy-five pounds the print,
it's a ridiculous amount of money, that's great for prototyping but... so I need to get
injection molds done and they cost twenty odd thousand pounds they cost a
fortune so the Kickstarter will be launched once this new version comes
along probably end of July beginning of August and the reason for the Kickstarter is
purely to pay for the molds for this front and for these panels these little
insert panels because that's...there's no way I can fund that
myself that's the bottom line, but yes so it's coming on, I think it's coming on
quite nicely, as I said that the bulk of the work is now done, I think
it makes quite a nice little system I hope you do too, people ask what's the price
of this case now the basic case which is the metalwork, the front panel, I haven't
decided yet on the panels, what you're going to get with it with these, I mean
obviously two blanks, that itself will be, the target is 150 pounds
that's always been the target price, this board obviously is extra because
not everyone needs this I'm not sure the prices here but it's around fifty pounds I
think for this, it's going to be give or take, and then there will be on my Shapeways store, they'll be
little bits and pieces like internal, if you buy the LG drive, slim drive,
you can either make your own (bracket), and I'll give the designs away for doing
it, but you might as well just dawn it off my Shapeways page there'll be a tiny
profit on there just to kind of recoup a little bit, it won't be a lot I promise it
won't be much, but then that will hold the drive for you in place
there will be lots of little bits like that on the Shapeways page which will be 3d
printed things like the GPU inside sits sideways, they are
very heavy so there'll be a holder to hold that up, which you don't really want to
make out metal but yeah, so thanks Neil for inviting me on thanks for
having a look at the 1500 and going through the history it was an
interesting time of my life I haven't told you all the
sordid details, the depression and that kind of thing but yeah, so it's an
interesting time and now I get to play now, in the old days it was my living
and now it's not, it's a hobby which is actually much better
the final chapter of our very British Amiga story remains to be written then
when Stephen has finalised the design of the checkmate a 1500 plus he will launch
a Kickstarter to fund the moulds in the meantime if you'd like to follow his
project you can find more information using the links in the description of
this video or by searching for the checkmate a 1500 plus I know I'll be
following with interest to see how the story concludes and if Stephen will
proclaim at the end of it checkmate Commodore checkmate as always
thank you for watching and take care
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