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Amiga Ranger Chipset
Amiga Ranger is an unreleased prototype personal computer by Commodore which was intended to be the second generation Amiga chipset, prior to ECS. It was designed by the original Los Gatos Amiga team including Jay Miner. Overview After the release of the Amiga 1000, Jay Miner began to design its intended successor, between 1986 and 1987. Code-named Amiga Ranger, it was planned to be highly expandable like Amiga 2000 with better graphics and CPU. The Ranger is said to have possibly included a 68010 or 68020 CPU. Information for this new chipset remains unclear. However, the sound system may have still been the same as the original chipset. According to R. J. Mical, the new chipset kept the original 13-bit DAC for its CLUT but with quadrupled color registers from 32 to 128. The color palette would have remained at 4096 colors but the resolution could go up to 1024×1024 pixels with 128 colors (7-bit color depth). Additionally the chipset can address up to of Chip RAM space. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Commodore International
Commodore International (other names include Commodore International Limited) was an American home computer and electronics manufacturer founded by Jack Tramiel. Commodore International (CI), along with its subsidiary Commodore Business Machines (CBM), was a significant participant in the development of the home personal computer industry in the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s. The company developed and marketed the world's best-selling computer, the Commodore 64 (1982), and released its Amiga computer line in July 1985. With quarterly sales ending 1983 of $ (equivalent to $ in ), Commodore was one of the world's largest personal computer manufacturers. History Founding and early years Commodore co-founders Jack Tramiel and Manfred Kapp met in the early 1950s while both employed by the Ace Typewriter Repair Company in New York City. In 1954, they formed a partnership to sell used and reconditioned typewriters and used their profits to purchase the Singer Typewriter Company. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
X68000
The is a home computer created by Sharp Corporation. It was first released in 1987 and sold only in Japan. The initial model has a 10 Megahertz, MHz Motorola 68000 Central processing unit, CPU, 1 Megabytes, MB of Random Access Memory, RAM, and lacks a Hard disk, hard drive. The final model was released in 1993 with a 25 MHz Motorola 68030 CPU, 4 MB of RAM, and optional 80 MB SCSI hard drive. RAM in these systems is expandable to 12 MB, though most games and applications do not require more than 2 MB. The X68000 has graphics hardware similar to arcade video games of the late-1980s, with custom coprocessors supporting scrolling, tiled backgrounds, and large numbers of sprite (computer graphics), sprites. There are multiple sound chips supporting 8 channels of FM synthesis; 2 channels of stereo, digital audio; and one channel of pulse-code modulation audio. As such, Video game, video gaming was a major use of the X68000. Operating system The X68k runs an operating ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
List Of Home Computers By Video Hardware
This is a list of home computers, sorted alphanumerically, which lists all relevant details of their video hardware. Home computers are the second generation of desktop computers, entering the market in 1977 and becoming common during the 1980s. A decade later they were generally replaced by IBM PC compatible "PCs", although technically home computers are also classified as personal computers. Examples of typical early home computers are the TRS-80, Atari 400/800, BBC Micro, the ZX Spectrum, the MSX 1, the Amstrad CPC 464 and the Commodore 64. Examples of typical late home computers are MSX 2 systems, and the Amiga and Atari ST systems. Note: in cases of manufacturers who have made both home and personal computers, only machines fitting into the ''home'' computer category are listed. Systems in the personal computer category, except for Early Macintosh PCs, are generally based on the VGA standard and use a video chip known as a Graphics Processing Unit. Very early PCs used on ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Hombre Chipset
Hombre is a RISC chipset for the Amiga, designed by Commodore, which was intended as the basis of a range of Amiga personal computers and multimedia products, including a successor to the Amiga 1200, a next generation game machine called CD64 and a 3D accelerator PCI card. Hombre was canceled along with the bankruptcy of Commodore International. History In 1993, Commodore International ceased the development of the AAA chipset when they concluded conventional PC clones would have similar performance shortly after the AAA machines would be released. In the place of AAA, Commodore began to design a new 64-bit 3D graphics chipset based on Hewlett-Packard's PA-RISC architecture to serve as the new basis of the Amiga personal computer series. It was codenamed Hombre (pronounced "ómbre" which means ''man'' in Spanish) and was developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard over an estimated eighteen-month period. Backward compatibility Hombre does not support any planar mode, nor any em ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Advanced Amiga Architecture Chipset
The AAA chipset (Advanced Amiga Architecture) was intended to be the next-generation Amiga multimedia system designed by Commodore International. Initially begun as a secret project, the first design discussions were started in 1988, and after many revisions and redesigns the first silicon versions were fabricated in 1992–1993. The project was all but abandoned in 1993 after it was projected that PCs were to equal the AAA shortly after release, so a further jump was needed, leading to project Hombre. AAA was not designed to be AGA compatible. Design goals AAA was slated to include numerous technologies. * 32/64 bit data bus. * 256 deep CLUT entries 25-bit wide each (256 indirect colors indexed through 24-bit palette with extra genlock bit like AGA has). This mode runs in the native AmigaOS display. * Direct 16 bit-planes planar pixels without CLUT entries, since this mode doesn't contain a palette or a CLUT it requires some kind of ReTargetable Graphics (RTG) driver like ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture
Amiga Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA) is the third-generation Amiga graphic chipset, first used in the Amiga 4000 in 1992. Before release AGA was codenamed Pandora by Commodore International. AGA was originally called AA for Advanced Architecture in the United States. The name was later changed to AGA for the European market to reflect that it largely improved the graphical subsystem, and to avoid trademark issues. AGA is able to display graphics modes with a depth of up to s per pixel. This allows for in indexed display modes and (18-bit) in Hold-And-Modify (HAM-8) modes. The palette for the AGA chipset has 256 entries from (24-bit), whereas previous chipsets, the Original Chip Set (OCS) and Enhanced Chip Set (ECS), only allow out of 4096 or 64 colors in Amiga Extra Half-Brite (EHB mode). Other features added to AGA over ECS are super-hi-res smooth scrolling and 32-bit fast page memory fetches to supply the graphics data bandwidth for 8 bitplane graphics modes and wider ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Original Chip Set
The Original Chip Set (OCS) is a chipset used in the earliest Commodore Amiga computers and defined the Amiga's graphics and sound capabilities. It was succeeded by the slightly improved Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) and greatly improved Advanced Graphics Architecture (AGA). The original chipset appeared in Amiga models built between 1985 and 1990: the Amiga 1000, Amiga 2000, Amiga CDTV, and Amiga 500. Overview of chips The chipset which gave the Amiga its unique graphics features consists of three main "custom" chips; ''Agnus'', ''Denise'', and ''Paula''. Both the original chipset and the enhanced chipset were manufactured using NMOS logic technology by Commodore's chip manufacturing subsidiary, MOS Technology. According to Jay Miner, the OCS chipset was fabricated in 5 µm manufacturing process while AGA Lisa was implemented in 1.5 µm process. All three custom chips were originally packaged in 48-pin DIPs; later versions of Agnus, known as Fat Ag ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
West Chester, Pennsylvania
West Chester is a borough and the county seat of Chester County, Pennsylvania. Located within the Philadelphia metropolitan area, the borough had a population of 18,461 at the 2010 census. West Chester is the mailing address for most of its neighboring townships. When calculated by mailing address, the population as of the 2010 U.S. Census was 108,696, which would make it the 10th largest city by mailing address in the state of Pennsylvania. Much of the West Chester University of Pennsylvania North Campus and the Chester County government are located within the borough. The center of town is located at the intersection of Market and High Streets. History The area was originally known as Turk's Head—after the inn of the same name located in what is now the center of the borough. West Chester has been the seat of government in Chester County since 1786 when the seat was moved from nearby Chester in what is now Delaware County. The borough was incorporated in 1799. In the heart ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Amiga Zorro II
Zorro II is the general purpose expansion bus used by the Amiga 2000 computer. The bus is mainly a buffered extension of the Motorola 68000 bus, with support for bus mastering DMA. The expansion slots use a 100-pin connector and the card form factor is the same as the IBM PC. Zorro II cards implement the Autoconfig protocol for automatic address space assignment (similar to the later PCI technology on the PC). The prototype "Zorro bus" expansion box for the Amiga 1000 was the basis for the initial Amiga 2000-A model design. This box connected to the Amiga 1000 unbuffered CPU bus card edge connector. Zorro II was succeeded by Zorro III, a 32-bit, asynchronous bus. Memory map External links Amiga Hardware Database- Descriptions and photos of Zorro II cards.Discussion about speed of Zorro Zorro II Zorro II is the general purpose expansion bus used by the Amiga 2000 computer. The bus is mainly a buffered extension of the Motorola 68000 bus, with support for bus mastering DMA. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dave Haynie
Dave Haynie is an American electrical engineer and was chief engineer at Commodore International. He is vocal in the Amiga community. See also * Metabox (on German Wikipedia) * PIOS The International Open Series (often referred to as Pontins International Open Series or PIOS for sponsorship purposes), was a series of snooker tournaments that ran from the 2001/02 season until the 2009/10 season. It was originally called the ... (on Spanish Wikipedia) References External links Long interview with Dave Haynie (in French)Carsten Schlote's homepage with details on the Metabox 1000 OS 'CaOS' [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Blitter
A blitter is a circuit, sometimes as a coprocessor or a logic block on a microprocessor, dedicated to the rapid movement and modification of data within a computer's memory. A blitter can copy large quantities of data from one memory area to another relatively quickly, and in parallel with the CPU, while freeing up the CPU's more complex capabilities for other operations. A typical use for a blitter is the movement of a bitmap, such as windows and fonts in a graphical user interface or images and backgrounds in a 2D video game. The name comes from the bit blit operation of the 1973 Xerox Alto, which stands for bit-block transfer. A blit operation is more than a memory copy, because it can involve data that's not byte aligned (hence the ''bit'' in ''bit blit''), handling transparent pixels (pixels which should not overwrite the destination), and various ways of combining the source and destination data. Blitters have largely been superseded by programmable graphics processing uni ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
AAA Chipset
The AAA chipset (Advanced Amiga Architecture) was intended to be the next-generation Amiga multimedia system designed by Commodore International. Initially begun as a secret project, the first design discussions were started in 1988, and after many revisions and redesigns the first silicon versions were fabricated in 1992–1993. The project was all but abandoned in 1993 after it was projected that PCs were to equal the AAA shortly after release, so a further jump was needed, leading to project Hombre. AAA was not designed to be AGA compatible. Design goals AAA was slated to include numerous technologies. * 32/64 bit data bus. * 256 deep CLUT entries 25-bit wide each (256 indirect colors indexed through 24-bit palette with extra genlock bit like AGA has). This mode runs in the native AmigaOS display. * Direct 16 bit-planes planar pixels without CLUT entries, since this mode doesn't contain a palette or a CLUT it requires some kind of ReTargetable Graphics (RTG) driver like ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
