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Hombre chipset

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In 1993, Commodore International canceled the development of the AAA chipset and began to design a new 64 bit multimedia system with 3D graphics chipset including fully RISC architecture that would once again bring the Amiga back into the limelight. It was to be known as 'Hombre' multimedia system and would be developed in conjunction with Hewlett-Packard over an estimated 18 month period Hombre (pronounced ombré which means man in Spanish) was based around two chips the first one (designed by Dr. Ed Hepler,Designer of AAA Andrea chip) is a System Controller chip similar in principle to the Chip Bus Controller found in Agnus, Alice, and Andrea of classic Amiga Chipset. This chip featured an advanced DMA engine and blitter with 3D texture mapping plus gouraud shading and a 16 bit sound processor as well as the PA-RISC processor (PA-7150) with up to 125 MHz clock speed. The other chip (designed by Tim McDonald,Designer of AAA Monica chip) is a Display Controller chip like Denise, Lisa, and Monica found on "Classic Amigas". The chipset also supported future official or third party upgrades through extension for an external PA-RISC processor. These chips and some other circuitry would be part of a PCI card (through ReTargetable graphics system) also Hombre was to form the basis of Amiga CD32 type game console that was to be launched in 1995 competing with Sony's Playstation and Sega Saturn. There were plans to port AmigaOS Exec kernel to low-end systems but this was not possible due to financial troubles facing Commodore at that time. However, a licenced OpenGL library was to be used for the low-end entertainment system. Commodore chose PA-RISC 7150 over MIPS R3000 RISC CPU and first generations embedded PowerPC cores because these low cost CPUs were unqualified to run Windows NT , this wasn't the case for the 64-bit MIPS R4200 which was powerful enough to run Windows NT but was rejected for it's high price at the time which was not suitable for a low end machine. The original plan was simply to have Windows NT compatibility until native AmigaOS recompiled for the new big-endian CPU to run 68k AmigaOS legacy software through emulation.

Hombre was designed with a clean break from traditional Amiga chipset architecture with no planar graphics mode support only supporting 32 bit (24-bit with 8-bit alpha channel) and 16-bit chunky graphic modes with resolution of up to 1280 x 1024 in 16.7 million colors with standard TV compatibility and HDTV support. It was also possble to do 4 playfields at 16 bit graphics mode each. The chipset can use 64-bit DRAM for high resolution PCI graphics card and by using it with minimal peripherals ASICs and RAM a 64 bit low end multimedia computer (like the successful A1200),with cheap 32-bit DRAM a low cost CD-ROM based game system (possibly CD64) could be built, it could also be used for Set-Top-Box embedded systems. According to Dr. Ed Hepler Hombre was to be fabricated in 0.6 µm 3-level metal CMOS with the help of HP (which fabricated AGA Lisa chip and collaborated in AAA chipset designing). However Commodore were planning to adopt Acutiator advanced architecture designed by Dave Haynie for Hombre before it went out of business and bankrupt.