OCS
More info
- Manufacturer
- Commodore–Amiga
- Released
- 1985
- Type
- Chipset
- Successor
- ECS, AGA
The Amiga's original chipset from 1985 — Agnus, Denise and Paula, the three chips that gave the machine graphics and sound far ahead of its peers.
When the Amiga 1000 shipped, the division of labour was radical: a CPU freed from the heavy lifting while three custom chips handled blitting, display timing and four channels of sampled sound in parallel. Denise drew up to 32 colours from a palette of 4096, or all 4096 at once via the HAM trick; Paula played the audio; Agnus ran DMA and the programmable copper coprocessor. Together they defined what a demo on the platform could even attempt.
The design bore Jay Miner's fingerprints and stayed largely unchanged in the A500 and A2000. The successors ECS (1990) and AGA (1992) extended the same architecture rather than replacing it.