Amiga Ranger Prototype Found!

[chrisxyz]

I took this picture at Dale's house.  We will be reshooting a lot of these artifacts and some hopefully will see their way into Brian's fine work.

Firstly this was pulled out of Dale's vast vaults for the 30th anniversary event in Mountain View, CA on 25th and 26th July (amiga30.com).  Luca Severini should also get thanks for cleaning up these artifacts and Bill Borsari for putting the past year of effort in to make the event happen! If you come to the event you will get to see this up close and personal.  A LOT of effort has gone into this event and is going to have LOTs of things possibly never seen before.  There is also going to be the largest gathering of original Amiga employees since the 80's all available to ask new and unusual questions to....I am personally so excited as this has been 30 years in the making.

I spoke to Dale about the Ranger and the idea there was a new chipset is bogus.  This was a new mechanical design (case) and the ability to have multiple expansion cards (zorro cards).  The image Brian posted is of a case mockup that was for thermal testing of the mechanical design.  It would be great if we could get the wikipedia article on this subject corrected (there was no "Ranger Chipset".....well the Zorro autoconfig logic doesnt really count.

For now let me leave you with more images of the ranger, some crisp images of Agnus and a couple of the developer units.  Enjoy and spread the word for the 30th Anniversary, its a great excuse to visit the San Francisco Bay Area and meet some of our geek idols.



http://chrisxyz.smugmug.com/Amiga-Ranger-what-should-of/

http://chrisxyz.smugmug.com/Amiga-1k-prototype/

http://chrisxyz.smugmug.com/Amiga-pre-A1K-developer-units

http://chrisxyz.smugmug.com/Agnus-chip/

p.s. These images are placed into the Creative Commons but please give attribution if citing them.

Enjoy
Chris Collins & all of the Amiga 30th volunteer team

[chrisxyz]

R10 is the mockup of the front of the Ranger.  Its a solid piece of plastic that was milled out.  The two oblongs at the bottom are a bit of a mystery to me.  At first I thought they were 3 1/2 inch drive mockups but I think the larger slot at the top of the face plate is for the drives....well at least if I try and line it up to the thermal mockup.  Thats assuming the face plate and the thermal mockup were the same design and revision.  Hopefully one of the old timers will tell us the scoop at the show....if not we can always trust the internet to make a nice story up for us.

[chrisxyz]

Dale was pretty adamant that Ranger DID NOT have a new chip design, it was not the purpose.  I have more images (but they are not up on my smugmug and wont be there till after the celebrations next weekend).  And yes it should of probably been labeled lorraine.  Yes the zorro riser board you see was for an amiga 1000 (they had to develop on something)....its pretty similar to something like "Bill's Board" or one of the other trillion zorro expansion boards you can get after market.  I think most of the HW development was perhaps around the zorro and cards.  Though I think the Ranger would of been pretty cool and the 2k is a bit ugly looking it was probably a good call commodore made to go with the german design.  After all, it gave them more space to also jam a bridgeboard type gig into the case to sell more "stuff".  The ranger is more like a 3k, but the 3k is considerably bigger than the ranger case design.  The square zorro boards do line up with the dimensions of the cavity in the thermal test design so I believe that was "to scale".

[chrisxyz]

So I was carrying around the Agnus wire wrap (its 8 boards as you can see).  Its never going to work again I am sure since there are shorts and wires loose.  That said its certainly fragile.  On top of that its probably (my guess) about 30 lbs in weight.  There is a set of interesting hinge mechanisms down one side so they could flip it open like a book and it creeks like a 1950's horror movie.  Its an AMAZING piece of history.  An approach to chip design we will not see again.  I felt very fortunate that Dale let me get within 10ft of this thing.  Whats interesting is that a few weeks ago I was standing with Dave Needle, Bob Burns and Dale Luck and I mentioned "lorraine", Dave said "ok what is that, I cant remember?"  Bob Burns remark was "well the internet says it was ....".  Saturday will be interesting to hear from the team starting with Joe Decuir and Ron Nicholson where they will talk about the initial design of the custom chips.  again if you can make it here is the info (amiga30.com)