Talk:Amiga Ranger Chipset

A thought on the maximum colours, with those 128 palette registers...

I don't think it would necessarily have been a 7-bit, 128 colour mode. Look at EHB - there's 32 registers, but it pulls a quasi-6-bit, technically-64-colour (but more practically, 63, as you don't get "half black") out of that. I mean, if you're going to go that far, why not make the chip with 256 registers on it? I bet the idea would have been to have, at least in the lower resolutions (given that doing so at 1024x1024 would consume an entire 1MB of chip RAM), an 8-bit, 255/256-colour mode using a 7-bit index and a 1-bit intensity flag. "EHB-7" vs the original and then-retronym'd "EHB-5", if you like.

If you set your base palette up sort of like EGA with a double-depth green channel, you could have a quite good generalised palette for productivity use and simpler graphics, or even an extended HAM mode. (8 bits... leading bit is 1 for a 7-bit palette index, or 0 for modifying, with a further 3-bit mask for what combination of channels are affected by the mod... so you don't even need to spec black, white, or any flat greys in your master palette, freeing up a few custom entries, and reducing the typical colour fringe to a single pixel instead of two... and all 0s in the first nybble could even represent Alpha/Genlock... OK, so it's only saving 4 bits from every pixel instead of 6, but it still doesn't need the full bandwidth, memory or disc space of 12bpp, which could be quite significant, especially when 1MB of RAM was a common *optional* amount versus 512KB, and 800KB floppy discs were most people's primary storage; 352x240 would only need 84KB, not 126KB. Probably a lot easier to work with in terms of game/other motion graphics too. Knock the playfield down to an arcade-like 256 pixels wide, bring the Copper into play and choose your palette carefully, and only every other pixel, on average, need be HAM'd rather than just indexed, with a number of those HAMs themselves being effectively "free" indices)

But, as the article says, it's all a matter of conjecture and fantasy at this point. The only way to ever know would be to get a time machine and infiltrate the company in the mid-late 80s... 193.63.174.211 (talk) 15:01, 5 June 2014 (UTC)

Total nonsense
This "ranger" chipset never existed. It's a stupid rumour that comes from a thirty year old game of chinese whispers. There was a "Ranger amiga", the prototype still exists, but it's nothing more than an alternative design project to Amiga 2000. It has to special capabilities whatsoever. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2A02:A442:581E:1:E44F:7001:DE48:D7FE (talk) 12:57, 24 January 2020 (UTC)

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