I know a supposed Ranger prototype was in the possession of Dale Luck, but that was a system design prototype and not a chipset.
Right.
Ranger was the A1000 expansion with Zorro I cards.
I have always wondered if the UHRES functionality in ECS (not the SuperHires, that is different) was from Jay's VRAM design.
When you have VRAM then display fetches are external to Agnus, and UHRES requires external circuitry. So it's entirely possible the chip design was done but not the board design, or the board design has yet to surface. I have hoped that someone would reverse engineer how UHRES works and maybe even create something that uses it. Although the documentation only talks about 1 bit plane, you could probably use memory interleaving and use 8 VRAM chips to create a 256 colour mode. Display fetches wouldn't use any dma bandwidth.
FWIW it looks like the Ranger might have been released. This advert for an expansion for the A1000 has Zorro slots (not Zorro II) and "ranger" $c00000 ram.
http://amiga.resource.cx/adcoll/adcoll.pl?id=paljr&pg=5
