Wow, Brian Bagnall has just posted about the Amiga Ranger prototype that has been found by Dale Luck!

Photo below:



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1462758959/commodore-the-amiga-years-book/posts/1294091

For those that don't know:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset

Cool find, but I wouldn't exactly expect it to do much in the terms of wondrous hardware discoveries.  It is, after all - simply a prototype system from almost 20 years ago that came in between OCS and ECS, and wasn't a terribly huge step up to begin with, IMO.

In terms of a working history of the Amiga, it's a big find, though.

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

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.

Sweet, love the pics, and looking forward to seeing it in person.  Got my plane tickets already, sh*t, still need to make hotel reservations and a rental car, though!  

PS - Image R10 - what is that??

Hey!  The Commodore/AMIGA logo font on that prototype case with the green power button is really different and cool!  As is the very early pre-Commodore stylized "A" logo key near the enter key on the developer system.  That stylized A key uses the same font as the earliest Amiga logo (from when Amiga was still its own company making joysticks to fund R&D).

Neat to see the "what could have been" graphic design elements of these early Amigas.

Book now!  Only a few room left and the rate is gone after the 17th.

Genuinely fascinating stuff. Great pics!

@Chrisxyz
I read at eab.abime.net that Toni WinUAE author could include Ranger in WinUAE if he can have roms dumps and high res pictures of the motherboard but you better ask him directly. Is all this possible ?
Kamelito