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Amiga Hombre chipset

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The Hombre chipset was to be a chipset for use in game machine hardware.[1] However, because of Commodore International's bankruptcy, the Hombre chipset was never released.

History

In 1993, Commodore International cancelled the development of the AAA chipset and began to design a new 64 bit multimedia system with 3D graphics chipset including fully RISC architecture that would once again bring the Amiga back into the limelight. It was to be known as "Hombre" multimedia system and would be developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard over an estimated 18 month period.

Design

Hombre (pronounced ómbre which means man in Spanish) was based around two chips: a System Controller-chip and a Display Controller chip.

The System Controller-chip was designed by Dr. Ed Hepler, well known as the designer of the AAA Andrea chip. The chip is similar in principle to the Chip Bus Controller found in Agnus, Alice, and Andrea of the classic Amiga Chipset. The chip featured:

The Display Controller Chip was designed by Tim McDonald, also known as the designer of the AAA Monica chip. It is similar in principle to the Denise, Lisa, and Monica chips found on "Classic Amigas". In addition, the chipset also supported future official or third party upgrades through extension for an external PA-RISC processor.

These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a PCI card (through a ReTargetable graphics system). Hombre would form the basis to the Amiga CD32 type game console that would launch in 1995 and would be competing with Sony's Playstation and Sega Saturn.

There were plans to port the AmigaOS Exec kernel to low-end systems, but this was not possible due to financial troubles facing Commodore at that time. Therefore, a licenced OpenGL library was to be used for the low-end entertainment system.

The original plan for the Hombre-based computer system was to have Windows NT compatibility, with native AmigaOS recompiled for the new big-endian CPU to run legacy 68k AmigaOS software through emulation. Commodore therefore chose the PA-7150 microprocessor over the MIPS R3000 microprocessor and first generation embedded PowerPC microprocessors, mainly because these low-cost microprocessors were unqualified to run Windows NT. This wasn't the case for the 64-bit MIPS R4200, but it was rejected for its relative high price at the time.

Features

Hombre was designed as a clean break from traditional Amiga chipset architecture with no planar mode support.Commodore also decided to drop support of the original Amiga eight sprites because at the time sprites became less attractive to developers for its limitations compared to fast blitters. Despite lack of compatibility it introduced newer technologies including:

  • Indexed 8-bit (256 colors) chunky mode with 24-bit CLUT(not confirmed by Dave Haynie)
  • non-indexed 16-bit chunky graphic modes
  • 32-bit chunky with 8-bit alpha channel)
  • 1280 x 1024 progressive resolution in 16.8 million colors
  • One sprite with 24-bit colors (for mouse pointer)
  • 4 playfields at 16 bit graphics mode each
  • 3D texture mapping engine
  • Gouraud shading
  • Z-buffering
  • YUV compatibility with JPEG support
  • Enhanced chunky HAM modes (not confirmed)
  • Standard TV / HDTV compatibility
  • 64-bit internal data bus and registers.

The chipset could be sold either as a high end PCI graphics card with minimal peripherals ASICs and 64-bit DRAM. Or as a lower cost CD-ROM based game system (CD64) using cheap 32-bit DRAM, it could also be used for Set-Top-Box embedded systems.

According to Dr. Ed Hepler Hombre was to be fabricated in 0.6 µm 3-level metal CMOS with the help of HP (which fabricated AGA Lisa chip and collaborated in AAA chipset designing).

However Commodore were planning to adopt Acutiator advanced architecture designed by Dave Haynie for Hombre before it went out of business and bankrupt.

References

  1. ^ Dave Haynie (1995.01.24). "CBM's Plans for the RISC-Chipset". Gareth Knight. Retrieved 31 January 2010. The initial schedule of 18 months was for the Hombre game machine hardware. There's no real OS here, just a library of routines, including a 3D package, which would probably be licensed. The Amiga OS was not to have run on this system in any form. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |date= (help)

See also

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