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Originally Posted by hammer
Amiga Range still has a 4096 color palette with 7 bitplanes display.
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Evidence for Ranger having 7 bitplanes and 128 colors is slim. According to Brian Bagnall in 'Commodore the Amiga Years',
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Jay Miner had started his Ranger chipset in 1985 and by January 1987 it was largely complete... The chipset now added 1024x800... or 1024x1024... in monochrome... "These chips are completed and tested and only require a computer and memory to hold them together", Miner revealed at the time...
Jay Miner was frustrated that the price of VRAM had not fallen sufficiently by the time he had completed the Ranger chipset design. He tried to rationalize the chipset to Commodore's executives on the basis that they could throw in the memory at cost...
As noble as this sentiment sounded, it was also unrealistic... Companies that try to operate with slim profit margins usually find themselves going out of business.
In March, Miner handed off his chipset to the Westchester engineers to complete and fabricate. But as history shows, the Ranger chipset was never put into production by Commodore.
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What Miner handed over to Westchester was a logic design verified in a simulator, not an actual chipset. Past experience shows that it would probably require several silicon iterations to get the bugs out.
Interestingly the ECS chipset that Westchester ended up producing does have high-scan rate at 640x480, both in monochrome and 4 colors using a palette trick. It also has 2MB ChipRAM like Ranger, 1024x1024 blits, and extra register bits suggesting the possible use of VRAM. This indicates that they might have cribbed features off Miner's Ranger design. Or perhaps ECS
is the Ranger chipset in its final incarnation.
Another interesting thing is that one of the objections the Los Gatos team had to the A500 was that they didn't think the PLCC 'fat' Agnus would work because it had too much stuff integrated into it. This suggests that the Ranger chipset was less integrated. It may have had more custom chips, or more discrete logic like the original A1000 chipset did, which would make it even more expensive.
Unfortunately whatever it was that Miner handed over to Westchester has been lost. Dave Haynie says he never saw a circuit diagram or any hardware related to it. The only prototype we have of the Ranger computer has nothing resembling the Ranger chipset Miner spoke of.