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© 1997-2006
Gareth Knight
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What is a chipset?

A chipset is a number of custom chips that control certain parts of the computer, such as the graphics or sound, meaning the processor doesn't have to do the job and can get on with doing something else. The Amiga has always had some kind of chipset since the A1000 in 1985, whilst the PC has only just caught on with the MMX graphics chip.

What chipsets has the Amiga used?

The Amiga has used 3 main chipsets which were redesigned a number of times to gain specific speed increases.

1985

The first chipset in the A1000 and A500 was called OCS (Original ChipSet). It was made up Paula, Agnus and Denise. These allowed graphics to be displayed in different resolutions up to 640x512, and up to 4096 colours in HAM mode, as well as 4 channel stereo sound.

1989

The OCS chipset was upgraded slightly to become ECS (Enhanced ChipSet). The Agnus and Denise chips were upgraded, renaming it Fat Agnus. These allowed higher resolutions to be displayed.

1992

The latest custom chipset is called the AA chipset (Advanced Amiga). In many countries, particularly Europe and the UK it has become known as AGA (Advanced Graphics Architecture) to avoid conflict with a popular breakdown service, also known as the AA. The Agnus chip was replaced by Alice (who the flip is Alice?), and Lisa replaced Denise. This allowed resolutions of 1280x512 in VGA and a palette of 16.8 million colours, of which 256,000 can be displayed at the same time in HAM8 mode.
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