| Re: .0
Commodore has under development a new Amiga chipset that has basically
two new features:
1 meg of chip ram
a new non-interlaced 400 scan line mode
The new non-interlaced mode will require a multisync monitor. The mode
will have a severe restriction on number of colors available.
On the other hand, Commodore and a third party company have a new monitor
with frame buffer coming out that supports 1008 x 800 x 4 gray levels.
This monitor does not require any hardware changes to an Amiga to run.
I've heard that there will be two models: one for the Amiga 1000 and 500,
one for the 2000. The monitor does require running with modified system
software.
It appears there has been some changes of plans on the monitor. The
developer's newsletter discussed the monitor in moderate detail last
February. At that time, there was going to be one model and it was
going to be manufactured by Commodore. I suspect that Commodore made
the decision to sell the design, and a few changes in design and
market strategy resulted.
Dates:
I've heard dates running from September (hey, that's now!) to next year.
I am biased to the next year crowd. In other words, the projects are
evidence of Commodore hardware development effort, and should produce
warm fuzzy feelings. It's a bit early to plan on them as "solutions"
to "problems" yet.
I suspect that the Amiga 3000 is at least a year out. There have been
few details about it. I suspect that it will be a large project because
it will require complete redesign (and maybe rearchitecture) of the
custom chips. (The hardware types were always been saying things like:
give us more money and we will design a system with a blitter per
bitplane, hyperfast video ram, zillion voice sound, ...)
|
| I was talking to the guy at Five-D when I was having my A500 fixed,
and he said he was getting a lot of bad stuff from Commodore - bad
chips, bad disk drives, etc. He's got a whole stack of drives that
were miswired by the factory that supplies Commodore.
- Z
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