Amiga Enhanced Chip Set
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Enhanced Chip Set (ECS) is the name used for the enhanced version of the Amiga computer's original chipset (OCS). ECS was introduced in 1990 debuting in the Amiga 3000. Amigas produced from 1990 onwards featured a mix of OCS and ECS chips, or even a full Enhanced Chipset. In 1991 ECS was officially introduced to the low end Amigas with the introduction of the Amiga 500+. The last Amiga to use ECS was the Amiga 600.
ECS included the improved Super Agnus (with support for 2 MB of CHIP RAM) and Super Denise chips. Other additional features include:
- Support for Productivity (640×480 noninterlaced) and SuperHires (1280×200 or 1280×256) display modes, which were however limited to only 4 colors. Essentially, a 35ns pixel mode was added plus the ability to run arbitrary horizontal and vertical scan rates. This made also other display modes possible, but only the aforementioned modes were supported originally out of the box. However, for example the Linux Amiga framebuffer device driver allows the use of several other display modes.
- Ability of the blitter to copy regions larger than 1024×1024 pixels in one operation.
- Ability to display sprites in border regions (outside of any display window where bitplanes are shown).
These features were mostly suited to and used for serious software, rather than games. Features from the Kickstart 2 operating system were occasionally used for later games, and since these two technologies largely overlap, some users overestimate the ECS' significance. It was followed by the AGA chipset.
