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Amiga Advanced Architecture Chipset




AAA was slated to include numerous Technologies .

  • 64/32-bit data bus

  • It would include an updated version of Paula called 'Mary', that would provide 8 16-bit CD -quality audio channels that can be assigned either to left or right channel with sampling rate of upto 100 KHz ,additionally it does 8-bit audio sampling input.

  • It would incorporate a chip, 'Andrea', with an updated fully 32-bit Blitter and Copper , with support for Chunky /24-bit modes.

  • An indirect 16-bit (65536 colour) Planar pixels which can be chosen from 24-bit CLUT (16,7 million colours).

  • A direct Chunky 16-bit pixels(15 bits for 32768 colors and 1 bit for Genlock overlay),provided by custom chip 'Monica'

  • A new custom chip (for Double Buffering ) called 'Linda' for higher resolution video, up to 1280 x 1024.

  • A new Hybrid graphics mode (half Chunky half Planar ) for 24-bit byte-planes pixels (consisting of 3 planes of 8 bit chunks).

  • A new 8/4/2 bit Half- Chunky Graphics Mode which indirect through CLUT like Planar modes do.

  • A new packed (compressed) pixels (2-bit PACKLUT and 4-bit PACKHY) decompressed by Linda to 8-bit half-chunky or 24-bit Hybrid pixels respactively,used for speeding up animations.

  • A reverseable pixel clock which allow a built-in frame grabber (a Video Capture device) in Chunky modes (this only work with VRAM systems).

  • New Hold-and-Modify modes (HAM-8 chunky and HAM-10 for 24bit / 16.7 million colours).

  • Sprites size can go up to 128 bit width with any height.

  • Dual 8-bit playfields.

  • Using of VRAM for memory fetching also it could be configured to use A four cycle burst mode 32/64-bit DRAM chip memory fetching with a clock cycle of upto 114 MHz .

  • 12x to 20x memory bandwidth of Chip RAM access of ECS .

  • 8x Blitter speed increase of AGA / ECS Blitter .

  • Direct support for 4-megabyte-raw Floppy Disk s (2.88 MiB IBM-style-formatted and all known format including Mac floppies), plus support for direct interface to a raw CD-ROM drive or Digital Audio Tape DAT and a Digital Radio interface,managed by Mary chip(port and audio peripheral controller).

  • Asynchronous design managed by Linda and Andrea that makes AAA pixel clock independent of its bus clock so the chipset can work with different CPU architectures (including any RISC processor).

  • the chipset would include upto 1 million Transistors in its 64-bit dual-system configuration (total).

  • Up to 16MB ChipRAM ( Graphics memory) in dual-systems.

  • Two serial four-byte deep FIFO buffered UART ,one of these two UART is in the same RGA address as the original Paula UART .

  • A built-in Genlock .


The initial Chipset run was largely functional, but some important pieces such as the interrupt controller didn't work, and others were never tested.

Three prototypes called 'Nyx', meaning "night" in Classical Greek , were built as technology demonstrators and debugger boards for the new chips.

Commodore declared bankruptcy before designs were completed; some of the focus on AAA chips moved to creating a radically different 64-bit design based on a modified Hewlett-Packard PA-RISC 7150 CPU with added graphics instructions and video pipelines ( Hombre Chipset ). Fully functioning AAA chips were never produced, though they were much talked about in the trade press. Numerous plans for purchasing Amiga and salvaging the technology came and went after Commodore's demise; all of them including the realization that for the Amiga to stay competitive, the development and release of AAA would have to be one of their overriding goals.

PC technology eventually moved so far beyond the AAA specification that even in draft form, AAA is by now a legacy technology.


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