The A3400 is an early project name for what eventually became the Commodore A4000. No A4000s were ever released to the public with the A3400 designation however they were sent to developers such as Famo and Scala for evaluation. The unit was also supplied with a Commodore A3630 or A3640 but some versions appear to be able to take an 030 directly onto the motherboard. The unit was also supplied with a standard FB-357a floppy drive an A4000 style 240V PSU. There may have be North American versions supplied with a different voltage PSU.
- The motherboard is labelled "Commodore A4000, Rev 1"
- The daughterboard is labelled "A2400/A3400 DAUGHTER BOARD REV. 0.0"
- The A3630 is labelled "A3200/A3400 68020/030 BOARD Rev 1.0 "
- The A3640 is labelled "A3640 BOARD Rev.3.0"
- On some versions of the motherboard the ALICE and LISA chips are labelled "WAFER#6" and "WAF-06"
- On some versions of the motherboard the chips have hand-written labels.
Related article about A3200/A3400 daugtherboard
History of the A3400 (Source: http://privat.bahnhof.se/wb409723/blandat/a3400/history.htm):
Before we start
Before we start The A3400 is a projectname for what later became the A4000, it's a prototype and as such there's very little official information to go about, most of the is information you find here is picked up from interviews with Commodore engeneer Dave Haynie, some are from Mike Sinz of the AmigaOS group and other Commodore emplyees. We've tried our best to not speculate but precent the information as we've found it as much as possible and where there are speculations it's been presented as such to not "contaminate" the source information, however some sources information contradict other sources information and here we've evaluated the information presented (against all other sources) to give you the information we find most likely to be true. The A3400 have several links to another project, the A2200 so to get the full picture lets start there.
Collected information
The Commodore A2200, also called A1000jr around Commodore engeneers as an internal joke intended to annoy Bill Sydnes who was behind IBM's biggest failure the PCjr (the A2200 and A1000jr are one and the same) was an A3000 based computer with ECS chipset, IDE instead of SCSI but only supported Zorro2 due to a flaw in the daughterboard design that was crudly solved by removing the Zorro3 support. The A2200 was ment as an A2000 replacement but it was made after AA (later known as AGA) had been demonstrated in form of the A3000+ and A1000+ (both of these projects where canceled) and the different Commodore sales division simply didn't find the new A2200 system sellable so none or too few of them where order to justify production and as such no A2200 was ever marketed to the public.
The Commodore A2200 are commonly mixed-up with the AMI-Tech A2200, an Amiga Clone built around the CD32 motherboard with an additional pseudo-motherboard called Agent 88 all fitted in a slim AT desktop (this computer was markeded by Computer Answers of Canada but never sold to the public either and only one prototype is belived to exist, this due to Commodores liquidation and 65,000 CD32 motherboards, some destined for the AMI-Tech A2200 getting seized by creditors). Sometimes the mixup is fueled with the help of the A1000+ as the AmiTech A2200 and A1000+ have a few things in common (small desktop chassi, AA/AGA chipset, combine that with the Commodore A2200's nickname the A1000jr and the confusion is complete).
We need to clarify that the A2200 and A2400 are the same project but differs in the amount of Zorro2 slots available (2 for A2200 and 4 for the A2400). The same thing goes for the A3200 and A3400, also being the same project but with 2 or 4 Zorro3 slots avalable. That is why you will at times see these numbers crisscross a bit when explaining where the A4000 originated from. Dave Heynie at times say the A3400 derive from the A2200 and at times it's from the A2400 whilest Mike Sinz say the A3200 derives from the A2200 (both are right as the A3200/A3400 project derives from the A2200/A2400 project). Some sources claim the A2200/A2400 and A3200/A3400 projects to be one and the same only differ in CPU used, other sources claim the difference in the A3200 and A3400 is the CPU used... but with both the 020/030 and the 040 CPU board reading A3200/A3400 and former Commodore employees claiming otherwise we'll go with that and say those two theories are incorrect.
When the A2200 failed Commodore reused parts of the old projects in the new A3200/A3400 project and traces of this can be found in the system. Apart from the same motherboard formfactor and extremly simular design the daughterboard of the A3400 reads A2400/A3400, the ledboard of the front panel reads A2200. The AGA support is said to have been patched in from the A3000+ project and the motherboard seem to support this as the A3400 doesn't exclusivly use AGA chips in the chipset yet (early revision Alice can be detected as Agnus). Commodore also reused the diskdrive from the A3000 though it doesn't fit the chassifront propperly making eject hard, and even though the diskdrive have an activityled it's blocked by the front cover and the diskdrive activity is instead precented by the ledboard driven by the motherboard (it's possible that the entire front is from the old A2400 project as the metal chassi structure of the A3400 have the same 5.25" cutout seen on A4000 chassis but there's a 3.5" diskdrive slot molded in the front plastic covering this, however this is purely speculations). The A3200/A3400 was never ment as a market product but as a test platform for developers and this particular A3400 system comes from a GVP developer in Denmark.
The CPU board of the A3400 looks very much like the A3640 Rev3.x for A4000, however it doesn't read A3640 but instead A3200/A3400 68040 BOARD Rev 2.1. Story goes the A3640 CPU board actually started out as an extremly cheap 040 board to make the A2200 more attractive but once the CPU board was ready the A2200 had been canceled and the card got a new target system in the A3400 (although first introduced with the A3000T). In fact the 030 CPU board A3630 you find in the A4000 never got a new revision and there for still reads A3200/A3400 68020/030 BOARD Rev 1 (the board could take both 030 or 020 and during development it had both CPU's installed with jumpers to set which CPU to use... the ultra cheap 020 version was never sold with the A4000 however some 020 CPU boards have found it's way into the open through other ways but is not likely to work in A4000 motherboard due to the missing U860 and U152 chips on the motherboard after Rev1, the moderboard revision precent in the A3400 system).
A quick recap
Recap The A3400 is a developer system that derived from the A2200 ECS project (even sharing a few components such as the daughter board, ledboard and probably the entire chassi seing that the motherboard have the same formfactor pinheader for leds, port placements and more) patched with AGA parts from the A3000+ project (although not all chips are for the AGA chipset yet) and with Zorro3 support adressed. It use the CPU board initialy intended for the A2200 which was canceled before the CPU board was completed. The A3400 later became the A4000, that in itself have traces of the A3400 to A4000 transition in the form of the A3630 CPU board still reading A3200/A3400.