AAA? As Scotty said in Star Trek IV, "Why in god's name would you want that bucket of bolts?" :laughing:
Well, AAA is only the half of what the AA3000 prototypes promised...
... PCI slots. 2 or 3 usable, 100MHz, 32 or 64 bit. DMA supported, but only 5V type.
... Dual displays. You could double up on Monicas and Lindas. Both displays would run at maximum rate. I think Gemini was a prototype for that, together with twin mounting for 68030s and 68882s. Perfect for VR.
... Automatic blitting at chunky pixels, as well as traditional bitplanes.
....8 channel 64KHz 20 bit audio pixel playback via Mary chip, with 16 bit sampling at lower rates built in.
... cheap frame buffer for easy and low cost video digitization...
... no chipRAM slowdowns. Hardly ever.
... DSP capable of independent access to 32 bit memory.
That was the prototype A3000+, incredibly rare machine from 1991, hazily revealed at Devcon in 1993.
The AA3000 was similar, but just had AA chipset and DSP had to be done via CPU card with 68040 on board. Still nice if you wanted PCI though, I think.
The idea was, you could buy a motherboard, and just add RAM of a certain spec, and modules of a certain spec. You didn't have to have Zorro cards even. You paid a fortune and got amazing real time video editing, studio quality graphics and sound. Or you just went standard Amiga FP-RAM, 68030, AA chipset, and maybe might think about a DSP or PowerPC or different processor later.
I am not too sure which variant had the true 32/64 bit "Dual display" capability to be honest. Still researching.
Modularity was what it was all about - something the home Amigas never did that well.
