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Author Topic: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner  (Read 4889 times)

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Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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I stumbled across some page scans from another Amiga site of Amiga User International which contained an interview with Jay Miner from Q2 1988. I used to buy this magazine infrequently but never saw this article before.

This is interesting because up until today the fabled next generation chipset which should have gone in the next Amigas after the A1000, certainly before ECS chipsets, was actually completed it would appear. 128 colours 5 years before AGA? You bet your ass :) Not too much detailed information about Ranger, just how much improved things like blitting huge bobs on the screen thanks to VRAM and that it was clearly finished and delivered to Commodore, who never used it once not even in the A500plus days. There's no mention of Paula either except a throwaway comment about 100x larger bandwidth for DMA operations for all custom chips on the chipram bus.

Also has some interesting snippets about pre-OCS capabilities of the chipset and gives you an insight into some amazing facts like due to the A500/2000 being a year late there was no effective promotion of the A1000 in 1986. Crazy to think they could own Amiga and not do anything with it for 12 months!

A nice 3 page article anyway, the story of Amiga told by the father of the Amiga, so enjoy if you've never seen it. A fitting way to remember one of the 70s and 80s most talented engineers in the industry.

http://www.amigau.com/aig/jayminerinterview.html


(scans are linked on that page but are a bit ropey to read. I downloaded them and ran a 25% narrowing of the top end luminance levels and a moderate sharpening operation to improve readability of the page scans)
 

Offline gertsy

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #1 on: May 22, 2010, 09:42:26 AM »
Link times out..  )o:
 

Offline vic20owner

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #2 on: May 22, 2010, 11:49:23 AM »
Rather fitting don't you think? hah
Amiga 1200 030/50mhz 64MB Fast Ram 20GB HD
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Offline gareth

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #3 on: May 22, 2010, 12:42:44 PM »
AmigaUniversity seem to be having problems in recent years. Try the main site:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/jayminerinterview.html
 

Offline basman74

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #4 on: May 22, 2010, 02:17:48 PM »
Thanks for posting - indeed a very insightful article about a great man who's engineering talent and vision still dazzles us all to this very day! :)

His statements regarding Atari and his proposed successor to the 400/800 series machines got me to thinking how things turn out had he got his wish to build his 'super computer' there instead of @ commodore? What a game-changer that would've been for the market back then - an Amiga 2000 class system released in 1982-83 instead of 85-86?? Unbelievable! :crazy:

Valentin
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #5 on: May 23, 2010, 06:05:40 AM »
Strange, worked first time for me but never again. Thanks for the alternate link. If you are interested in the early years have a look at this different interview transcript from CU Amiga.

http://www.jonnydigital.com/jayminerinterview

Attached the interview as a txt file so if there's a bandwidth problem you can still read it, link is just a plain text copy anyway. I've also attached my processed and cleaned up scans for ease of reading too.

What is really damning for Commodore is that when the A1000 was finished there was still plenty of chipset evolution work by Jay's team at Los Gatos. They chose not to use this valuable resource. In fact they sacked a lot of them and killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

It's also fascinating to note that the A500 and A2000 engineers were separate teams and nothing to do with the Los Gatos team. Getting an A1000 into an A500 should have taken months not years, trapdoor 1mb + Kickstart ROM = finished.

Also bouncing ball demo was running in 1983 :)
« Last Edit: May 23, 2010, 06:09:55 AM by Amiga_Nut »
 

Offline Drummerboy

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #6 on: May 23, 2010, 07:51:10 AM »
Ohh.. yeah..  great interview.. I saw many years  ago.. but its fine reading again.
Some intersting facts in the interview for me;

He said, something i said many times... "Who needs MS DOS and Windows?!..

Another thing, to the time for Jay his "Dream Computer Creation" was the A2000.. He wants desing something like A2000, in fact said has 2 A2000.

He was annoy about the IDE port in the A4000, and he spected the A4000 came with 16 bit Audio..   and Commodore not released with thata features..

Was an error use the spanish word "AMIGA".. POR QUE MI AMIGO JAY?!.. TAL VEZ PENSO QUE NO ERA BUENA IDEA PARA EL MERCADEO DE LA MAQUINA EN ESTADOS UNIDOS!..  
Anyway, he is the Genius behind all our Amigas!.. You know i remember to him many times when i use any of my Amigas..  RIP JAY!! .
Amiga 1000, 500, 600, 2000, 1200, 4000...

C= VIC 20 / 64 /SX64/ 128

Atari 600XL (SIC Cartdridge)
Atari 800XL (SIO2SD unit)

Jay Miner`s Atari 2600 - Wood front -

\\"Amiga, this Computer have a Own Live\\"--\\"Silence When the Drums are Talking\\".... DrummerBoy
 

Offline psxphill

Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #7 on: February 04, 2011, 09:00:08 PM »
Quote from: Amiga_Nut;560081
This is interesting because up until today the fabled next generation chipset which should have gone in the next Amigas after the A1000, certainly before ECS chipsets, was actually completed it would appear.

I don't know if I believe it was as good as he makes out.
 
Although the trick isn't making something like that, it's making it cheap enough.
 
If commodore had put more effort into AA+ then they may have been ok for a little while. All the money they sunk into AAA/hombre was pointless.
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #8 on: February 22, 2021, 09:14:43 AM »
Strange, worked first time for me but never again. Thanks for the alternate link. If you are interested in the early years have a look at this different interview transcript from CU Amiga.

http://www.jonnydigital.com/jayminerinterview

Attached the interview as a txt file so if there's a bandwidth problem you can still read it, link is just a plain text copy anyway. I've also attached my processed and cleaned up scans for ease of reading too.

What is really damning for Commodore is that when the A1000 was finished there was still plenty of chipset evolution work by Jay's team at Los Gatos. They chose not to use this valuable resource. In fact they sacked a lot of them and killed the goose that laid the golden egg.

It's also fascinating to note that the A500 and A2000 engineers were separate teams and nothing to do with the Los Gatos team. Getting an A1000 into an A500 should have taken months not years, trapdoor 1mb + Kickstart ROM = finished.

Also bouncing ball demo was running in 1983 :)

Hey all,

FAO of moderators. Sadly I couldn't find any attachments, even when viewing my own post, to this post and these articles seem to have got lost in time (links are dead). Does anyone know if attachments didn't get carried over from various hosts or something or do they get auto deleted when not used for years etc?
 

Offline NinjaCyborg

Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #9 on: February 22, 2021, 09:23:12 AM »
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #10 on: February 22, 2021, 09:41:35 AM »
Hey :)

I was just curious to know exactly what I had attached really, hoped I had typed out the first interview in a TXT file too. The mag scans are still on wayback machine for 2010 (need to get better scans of the same pages from somewhere else ideally).

I just read a bit of it after doing some image processing and it was really depressing reading what was going on, especially after just reading exactly how much Gould's salary he paid himself was vs entire global profits of Commodore in the same two years. (89 and 1990 I think).

Fascinating how Amiga 1000 sold almost as many units in 12 months as Macintosh in it's first year (sales of which in 1985 were hit hard by the initially hot selling Atari 520ST). Also fascinating how Commodore was intent on not having anything the actual designers of the Amiga could have given them. Best not to read it actually!
 

Offline gareth

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #11 on: February 22, 2021, 07:38:05 PM »
The original scan can be found at the following:
http://www.bambi-amiga.co.uk/amigahistory/jayminerinterview.html
 

Offline Pyromania

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #12 on: February 22, 2021, 08:10:45 PM »
Someone should rescan those as PDF files. It would make for easy reading for sure.
 

Offline gareth

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #13 on: February 22, 2021, 11:48:12 PM »
The issue appears to be on archive.org. I won't post a direct link to it, just in case it's against the forum rules.
 

Offline Amiga_NutTopic starter

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Re: Fascinating insight into Amiga & the Ranger chipset by Jay Miner
« Reply #14 on: February 23, 2021, 01:43:51 PM »
Thanks everyone, I didn't see that issue on Archive.org when I looked  but I did find a PDF of it in nice quality somewhere else and went to the trouble of extracting the 3 page scans to 3 images at original size with a PDF extractor yesterday (My TV doesn't do PDF but it does images just fine as did old XP picture viewer on my laptop so it's an old habit for me to extract PDFs back to image files).

The original scans are not great at all, you couldn't OCR those at all...be quicker to squint at the pixels and guess the words whilst typing it in Notepad lol