AGA
More info
- Manufacturer
- Commodore
- Released
- 1992
- Type
- Chipset
- Predecessor
- OCS, ECS
- Platform
- Amiga 1200, Amiga 4000
The Amiga's third chipset generation from 1992 — it lifted the palette to 16.7 million colours and shipped in the A1200 and A4000, Commodore's last machines.
Advanced Graphics Architecture was the answer to a platform that had fallen behind the PC's VGA cards. Where OCS managed 32 on-screen colours, AGA reached 256 from a palette of 262,144 — more still through an extended HAM8 mode — and shifted graphics data at twice the internal width. Backward compatibility was near total, so old software kept running.
The chipset arrived late — Commodore was two years from bankruptcy when the A1200 launched — and for the scene "AGA-only" became a dividing line: demos that exploited the new modes refused to start on an unmodified A500. The intended successor, codenamed AAA, was never finished.