Eagle A4000TE
Andrew Elia and Chris Livermore both provide independent reviews of the Top Of The Range Amiga, we must be paying them to much!
My initial impression of the Eagle 4000TE was that it could boot faster
than any other computer I have ever used (including high-end Power Macs
and Pentium 166 PCs). From powering on, I saw the Workbench screen in
around five seconds. Phenomenal! I've since knawed away at that time and
pretty much doubled it with all the commodities and so on that I now
have installed.
It certainly seems solidly built, and for 2,500 quid, it ought to be!
From day one, I was always a little suspicious of the ABS plastic foot
that the tower sits on, but it seems sturdy enough. The front panel has
a push-to-open door to reveal the usual stuff, including two floppy bays
(one used by DF0), and six 5.25" bays (one of which is inhabited by my
TEAC 6x SCSI drive). This panel also sports an "Amiga Based" sticker,
which to be honest makes it look rather cheap. The discreet Eagle badge
is more than sufficient. However, I haven't had the heart to peel the
sticker off.
It comes with a typically noisy Seagate 1.1 Gig SCSI drive which so far
has given me no problems, and is certainly fairly nippy. SysInfo rated
the transfer at about 5 Mb/sec which, to be honest, seemed a little
disappointing, but it's not like I'm planning on spooling many
24-bit SuperHiRes animations at full frame rate or anything. However, I'd
rather have a Quantum drive any day. Faster, quieter and more reliable.
Curiously enough, all the machine's ports are positioned in what I'd
consider an upside-down position. I usually expect ports to have the
wide end at the top, and the narrow end at the bottom but it seems that
someone thinks differently. It takes some getting used to, but there you
go.
I found that although Blittersoft seem like a reasonable bunch of people
(and they've been in business longer than many others, so they must be
doing something right), I get the impression that they're not the most
efficient of people when it comes to dealing with their customers. From
the time I opened the box to investigate the disconcerting rattling
sound that had resulted from the speaker coming detached in transit, I
found that the floppy cable was broken (but still making contact). It's
now nearly a year and I still have yet to get that replacement. Granted,
I haven't phoned them every single week, I haven't had time. The
occasional phone call and E-Mail was all I could manage. One day,
perhaps.
My biggest bugbear with the machine was that there was never any
documentation supplied for the motherboard SCSI controller. There are a
series of DIP switches on the back of the machine and me being the
curious type I am, I want to know what they do. After all, I may need to
know some time.
The SCSI connector is one I can't say I've seen before in any computer.
It's got the same shape as a normal 25 pin D-socket, but has twice as
many pins horizontally. It took me a great deal of time going round
various shops in Tottenham Court Road trying to get a lead that ended in
the usual Centronics-type SCSI interface. I finally found a shop that
sold one -thirty bleedin' quid! In case you're interested, the shop was
Shyamtronics (Tel: 0171-637-1961).
Overall, this machine is the new love of my life. It's got all the
expansion slots I could ever need, tonnes of memory, and just about
everything else you'd expect from an Amiga. Pricewise, it's far from
cheap, and with the latest batch of clones on the way, it'll seem pretty
overpriced. It already looks as though Micronik's Amiga clones are going
to be significantly cheaper (albeit based on the A1200 motherboard
therefore making things a good deal cheaper).
Andrew Elia
I had been planning for a long time to replace my ageing A1500 with a more powerful machine,
however the Commodore "situation" and subsequent buyout by Escom had left me with little to choose from.
My ideal solution would have been something similar to the idea of the A1500/B2000 idea. An A1200 spec machine
but in a desktop or tower case with room for expansion, however this was not available and
neither did it look like appearing in the near future. After using a friends A4000 over the period of a few weekends I had decided
to take the plunge and order one, however my A1500 pre-empted this decision by finally giving up on me one week before
the World of Amiga show in 1996. Although a replacement hard drive would have got it up and running again, I decided to upgrade and so I purchased an A1200HD
at the show the following week. The difference between the two machines was amazing. Workbench 3 was an improvement over 2.01 and
the increase in speed was very welcome, and very noticable especially when using Final Writer to produce a report for my Final Year University project.
Despite the fact that the A1200 was a wonderful machine it was only planned as a stop-gap
until I could afford (and find) an A4000. Eagle offered a solution in the shape of the A4000TE, a tower cased A4000
manufactured by themselves under license from Amiga Technologies. My A4000TE finally arrived in September 1996 after a few
delays, apparently Eagle had difficulties obtaining Amiga keyboards as they were all tied up in warehouses held by liquidators due to the financial problems Escom were now
experiencing. Even though I had an 68060 Cyberstorm Mk II installed into the A4000TE the difference between it and the A1200 was not as obvious as the huge
leap from A1500 to A1200. This coupled with the fact that I had started my first full time job after graduating meant my A4000TE was overpriced and underused.
Externally the A4000TE is a very impressive machine. Standing over half a metre tall (65cm to be precise) the top half is hidden behind a plastic door with a smoked plastic window cut out to
show the numeric display and 3 LED's. The numeric display is a 3 digit affair, and would normally be
used to indicate the speed the PC that the case was designed for is running at. The 3 LED's are for power, turbo and disk activity. Apart for the disk activity light
the rest is a bit of a waste of time, however little flashing lights to seem to impress most of the computer illiterate, who must think they serve some extremely important purpose.
The only sign that the internal workings are not a PC is an Amiga sticker stuck onto the front door. Inside the front door there is a power button, plus a reset button, to save you pressing ctrl Amiga Amiga
and a turbo button which does nothing more than toggle the turbo LED on and off. Two 3 1/2 bays are provided (one being occupied by the floppy drive) and six 5 1/4
bays are provided, the lowest one being occupied by my CD ROM drive. The lower half of the tower is where the zorro expansion slots are
although this is not obvious from the outside. Six zorro slots are provided, five of them with in line graphics slots.
On the back you will a selection of peripheral ports. All the usual ones are there, joystick, mouse, parallel, serial and monitor. Although due to the internal positioning of the circuit boards the first four ports are actually upside down. Stereo audio output is provided although unfortunatly there is no provision for mixing the audio out from the CD without an external unit. Apparently this is due to a lack of connector the the Amiga motherboard.
The only extra port on the back of the machine is the SCSI connector. It`s actually a SCSI 2 port, which uses a mini 25 pin connector and offers far superior performance to normal SCSI. There is also a set of DIP switches next to the SCSI port, but no documentation on what they do has ever been supplied.
So now you know what it looks like, but what does it perform like. Well it's fast. Workbench isn't much faster than an A1200, but all the applications
run like lightning. It boots into workbench in about 1/20th the time a similar spec PC takes to load WindozeTM,partly due to the super-fast SCSI 2 internal disk, and partly due to workbench itself. Most applications
load instantaniously. Blink and you'll miss the busy pointer while Final Writer loads. Quite a different story from loading word on the PC or Mac, and Final Writer is just as capable
as Word if not more so in many area's. Shapeshifter runs like a real 060 based mac in 2 color mode, however when it was running on the original 12 megs of memory supplied it often refused to load
more than one program at once. Upgrading to 32 Megs has solved this problem, however it really only gets used fully by ShapeShifter and NetBSD. The Amiga side really doesn't need all 32 Megabytes for the fairly undemanding use I give it.
Some software refuses to work with the 060, mostly games, however various degrader programs are available and even the most
stubborn program can be coaxed to run given a little patience.
So is it worth the money I hear you ask. Well that depends. You can buy a similar spec PC with monitor for almost half the price
but frankly I wouldn't waste 1/10th of what I paid for my A4000 on a PC. For what it is the A4000TE may seem overpriced, and
compared to most PC systems it is. But when you buy a PC you only get one machine. My Amiga is infact four
different computers rolled into one. I can run MacOS care of Shapeshifter, Windoze programms run under PCx.
For work related purposes I run NetBSD (Unix) and of course don`t forget AmigaOS. And you couldn't buy those machines seperatly for the price I paid for them rolled into one.
Chris Livermore