The AAA chipset was intended to be the next-generation Amigamultimedia system designed by Commodore International. Initially begun as a secret project, the first design discussions were started in 1988, and after many revisions and redesigns the first silicon versions were fabricated in 1992–1993. The project was all but abandoned in 1993 after it was projected that PCs were to equal the AAA shortly after release, so a further jump was needed, leading to project Hombre. AAA was not designed to be AGA compatible.
256 deep CLUT entries 25-bit wide each. This mode runs in the native AmigaOSdisplay.
Direct 16 bit-planes planar pixels without CLUT entries, since this mode doesn't contain a palette or a CLUT it requires some kind of ReTargetable Graphics driver like chunky modes.
New Agnus/Alice replacement chip 'Andrea' with an updated 32-bit blitter and Copper which can handle chunky pixels.
A line-buffer chip with double buffering called 'Linda' provides higher resolution. Linda also decompresses two new packed pixels on the fly.
Updated version of Paula called 'Mary' with 8 voices that can be assigned either to left or right channel; each channel has 16-bit resolution with up to 100 kHzsample rate; additionally it does 8-bit audio sampling input.
Direct Chunky 16-bit pixels, provided by custom chip 'Monica', this mode requires RTG driver.
New 24-bit hybrid mode consisted of 3 byte-planes of 8 bit chunks each. Like chunky modes it requires RTG driver for lacking CLUT.
New 8/4/2 bit Half-Chunky Graphics Mode which indirect through CLUT like 8-bit planar modes do.
New packed pixels decompressed by Linda to 8-bit half-chunky or 24-bit Hybrid pixels respactively, used for speeding up animations.
A reverseable pixel clock for a frame grabber in chunky modes.
The initial chipset run was largely functional, but some important pieces such as the interrupt controller didn't work, and others were never tested. Three prototypes called 'Nyx', meaning "night" in Classical Greek, were built as technology demonstrators and debugger boards for the new chips. However Nyx was never intended as the final production machine, AAA systems would have been based around the Acutiator architecture designed by Dave Haynie. Commodore declared bankruptcy before designs were completed; some of the focus on AAA chips moved to creating a radically different 64-bit design based on a modified PA-RISC 7150 CPU with added graphics instructions and video pipelines. Fully functioning AAA chips were never produced, though they were much talked about in the trade press. Numerous plans for purchasing Amiga and salvaging the technology came and went after Commodore's demise; all of them including the realization that for the Amiga to stay competitive, the development and release of AAA or Hombre would have to be one of their overriding goals.
