[7] The Amiga 2000 offers graphics capabilities exceeded among its contemporaries only by the Macintosh II, which sold for about twice the price of a comparably-outfitted Amiga 2000 additionally equipped with the IBM PC Compatible bridgeboard and 5.25" floppy disk drive (which was important for real-world interoperability at this time).

Commodore's engineers believed that the company would probably be unsuccessful in matching the rate of system obsolesce and replacement then common in the PC industry, with new models every year or so.

Commodore was so successful at this that Info magazine judged that the A2000 would not become obsolete "until well after the turn of the century"[1] at the earliest.

The final design was the result of an internal battle within Commodore, which pitted the USA division, who wanted to build a system more like the Amiga 3000 (and 1000), against the German division, which was fresh from the successful introduction of the first Commodore PC-compatible systems and planned to include this capability in the Amiga 2000 from the start.

The original motherboard was based on the previous Amiga 1000 with the addition of expansion slots, and so suffered all the same limitations.

The practical differences are that the early 2000 motherboard only has 512 kilobytes of ram installed, cannot be upgraded with newer versions of the chipset, requires the original processor to be removed when installing a processor card, and cannot use a video slot mounted flickerfixer.

The A2000's original 68000 CPU remained installed on the motherboard of these machines and could be switched to by holding down the right mouse button when powering on the computer for better compatibility.

Initial units came with Kickstart 1.3 (and thus AmigaOS 1.3), though the Original Chipset onboard includes a later Agnus revision allowing the 1MB of ChipRAM.

The A2500 remained in production after the release of the A3000, primarily because the original Video Toaster will not fit in an unmodified A3000 case.

Likewise, 2 MB can be accommodated by fitting an 8372B Agnus chip and adding extra memory.

There is a practical limit of 8 MB of additional RAM without the use of a CPU expansion card, due to the 68000's 24-bit address bus.

This expansion bus allows installation of compatible hardware through the AutoConfig standard, such as, graphic, sound, and network cards and Parallel ATA, SCSI and USB controllers.

This allows use of dedicated genlocks, display deinterlacers, and video-switching and effects systems such as NewTek's Video Toaster.

1 MB consisting of either: Upgradeable to 2 MB "chip" RAM (some models require hardware modification) Upgradeable by further 8 MB without CPU upgrade or up to 128 MB with CPU upgrade Graphic modes with up to 32, 64 (EHB mode) or 4096 (HAM mode) on-screen colors: Graphic modes with up to 16 on-screen colors: ECS only graphic modes: 28 kHz maximum DMA sampling rate (56 kHz in ECS-only modes) 70 dB S/N ratio Monochrome composite video out (RCA)[B][C] Audio out (2× RCA) Genlock slot (internal)[A] Video slot (internal)[B][C] 2× Mouse/Gamepad ports (DE9) RS-232 serial port (DB-25M) Centronics style parallel port (DB-25F) Floppy disk drive port (DB-23F) 2× 16-bit ISA slots (requires bridgeboard to activate) 2× 8-bit ISA slots (requires bridgeboard to activate) 1× 86-pin CPU/MMU expansion slot 1× front accessible 5.25" drive bay Battery-backed real-time clock