Hombre- The last Commodore custom chipset
In 1992 Commodore canceled development of the AAA chipset and began
to design a new graphics chipset that would once again bring the
Amiga back into the limelight. It was to be known as 'The Hombre'
and would be developed in conjunction with Hewlett Packard over an
estimated 18 month period. Unbeknownst to Dave Haynie and the rest
of the team designing the Hombre it was to be the last great
development that Commodore would ever undertake and work continued
on it (albeit slowly) even after the fall of Commodore on April 29,
1994.
The choice of the Hombre is a confusing one to an audience so
used to the idea of the Amiga moving towards PowerPC. Rather than a
clean break with a new CPU, Commodore chose to produce Hombre as a
chipset with a PA-RISC core. At the time Apple were secretly
developing their PowerMAC range based upon the 601 processor.
However, as Dave Haynie once explained to an audience on Usenet,
the PA-RISC was chosen for Hombre due to the exact needs of that
project. It fitted the bill in a way that the first PowerPC
processors could not, providing speed along with a core that
matched the idealism of the Amiga operating system; , the core is
small enough to sit on a chip occupied by other functional units
(blitter, copper, system control) and the instruction set is
extendible for future upgrades. Whilst there were no 680x0
emulation modes built-in to the chip the instructions' architecture
was similar making an AmigaOS port slightly easier.
The Hombre chipset was based around two chips- the first was a
controller chip similar in principle to Agnus, Alice, and Andrea.
This chip featured an advance DMA engine and blitter as well as the
PA-RISC processor. The other was a display 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-50 processor. These chips and some other circuitry
would be part of a PCI card. This is confusing as, according to
Dave Haynie, Hombre was to form the basis of a CD32-type game
console. The reason behind this was the lack of any emulation- as
with the rest of the console market compatibility is not an issue
with software being made redundant every few years.
Operating System
One of the controversies surrounding Commodore during 1993 and 1994
was the decision NOT to run the Amiga OS. Dave Haynie has stated
that the only software that existed for the chip were a library of
routines, as well as a 3D package that would most likely be
licensed. Whilst an AmigaOS port was favoured by those in the
design team it was not under consideration by management. This
decision may have been based on the fact that, at the time
Commodore was losing money fast, so a machine had to be finished
soon to stay alive. The question is, would this have been an Amiga
if it was sold. The current definition of the Amiga is based around
the OS and compatible chipset design. But as mentioned, Hombre was
a clean break supporting none of the existing modes. It supported
16 and 24-bit true colour modes.
Unfinished Business
Whilst the design of both of the chip had not been finished, the
display chip was the most advanced, despite being the larger of the
two and only worked on by one man, Tim MacDonald, who designed the
AAA Monica chip. Dave Haynie gave an impression of how far work had
progressed during the 2 years since 1992,
"We were on Rev 2 of most chips by the time the project was shut
down. Much of Andrea had been characterized; we ran high resolution
displays, copper and blitter, 24-bit modes, etc. On the other hand,
only five of the 16 bitplane pointers worked, Monica's colour
lookup table was all wrong, and a bug in Andrea prevented the
testing of any read registers in the other chips. There was more
work to do."
During the first quarter of 1998 an argument raged on Usenet
proposing that Hombre could be upgraded slightly to replace the AGA
chipset to provide a short-term solution while research into new
hardware went ahead. This would have been too much trouble for
Amiga Inc. even if they currently employed the original design and
engineering team. Firstly the HP RISC would have to be licensed
again for the Amiga. Secondly, the Mary processor had not even been
tested, every screen display they tried to generate came out in the
wrong colours. The only part of the processor that would look
modern today, Mary, was completely untestable. Despite the
economics of such a decision, many still believe that it is a
viable alternative to current hardware.
In 2000, Hombre became the official name for the BoXeR
all-in-one chipset.
BACK
|
