[3] During the first year of its life the system reportedly sold well, but Commodore ran into cash flow problems and filed for bankruptcy.

Commodore had initially been working on a much-improved version of the original Amiga chipset, codenamed "AAA", but when development fell behind they rushed out the less-improved AGA, found on the A4000 and CD32 units.

While AGA is not notably less capable than its competition, when compared to VGA and its emerging extensions, the Amiga no longer commanded the lead it had in earlier times.

Further criticism was directed at the A1200's power supply, which is often inadequate in expanded systems, limiting upgrade options that had been popular with earlier Amiga models.

Due to fewer sales and short lifetime, not as many games were produced for the A1200 than for the previous generations of Amiga computers.

Up to 8 MB of "fast RAM" can be added in the "trap-door" expansion slot, which approximately doubles (~2.26×) the speed of a stock machine.

However, the sound hardware remains identical to the design used in the Amiga 1000, though the AGA chipset allows higher sampling rates for sound playback, either by using a video mode with higher horizontal scan rate or by using the CPU to drive audio output directly.

Like the Amiga 600, the A1200 features a PCMCIA Type II slot and an internal 44-pin ATA interface, both most commonly seen on laptop computers.

Later, a number of compatible laptop peripherals have been made to operate with this port including serial modems, network cards, and CompactFlash adapters.

Several third-party developers built and supplied popular kits to "tower up" the A1200 and, in essence, convert it to a "big-box" Amiga.

Such expansion slots make it possible to use devices not originally intended for the A1200, such as graphic, sound, and network cards.

The first incarnation of the A1200 shipped with Workbench 3.0 and Kickstart 3.0 (revision 39.106), which together provide standard single-user operating system functionality and support for the built-in hardware.

AmigaOS 4, a PowerPC-native release of the operating system, can be used with the A1200 provided Blizzard PPC PowerPC board is installed.

Upgradeable by a further: Up to 256 on-screen colors in indexed mode 262,144 on-screen colors in HAM-8 mode Resolutions from: 28–56 kHz maximum DMA sampling rate (dependent on video mode in use) Composite video out (RCA) RF audio/video out (RCA) Audio out (2× RCA) RS-232 serial port (DB-25M) Centronics-style parallel port (DB-25F) Floppy disk drive port (DB-23F) 44-pin ATA controller supporting PIO-0 transfer mode (internal) 16-bit Type II PCMCIA slot 22-pin clockport 3.6 kg Some software officially bundled with the A1200 included Deluxe Paint IV AGA (a 2D image and animation editor) and Final Copy (a word processor).

[14] The Amiga Technologies/Escom version was bundled with applications such as Scala (multimedia authoring software) and Wordworth (a word processor), and games like Pinball Mania and Whizz.

[15] In the UK the Amiga 1200 was available in a Desktop Dynamite bundle[16] which contained Workbench 3.0, Deluxe Paint IV AGA, Wordworth and two games: Oscar and Dennis.