Amiga Ranger was a prototype computer that was supposed to be the second generation Amiga chipset prior to ECS. It was designed by the original Los Gatos Amiga team including Jay Miner. However Commodore International didn't release this chipset due to its high cost

After the release of the A1000, Jay Miner intended to design a true successor to it. It was planned to be highly expandable like A2000 with better graphics and CPU, this machine was code named Amiga Ranger and its design began circa 1986-1987. The Ranger may have included a 68010 or 68020 CPU. The possible release date could have been 1988-1989.

Information for this new chipset remains sketchy. However, the sound system may have still been the same as the Original chipset. According to RJ Mical, the new chipset kept the original 13 bit DAC for its CLUT but with quadrupled color registers from 32 to 128. The color palette would have remained at 4096 colours but the resolution could go up to 1024×1024 with 128 colors (7 bit color depth), additionally the chipset can address up to 2 MB of Chip RAM space.

Ranger used 2MB VRAM as chip memory. In an interview, Jay Miner described benefits of using VRAM instead of DRAM- this gave the display system enough memory bandwidth for 1024×1024 displays. From the known specification, it could be said that Ranger chipset was designed to compete with Sharp's X68000 personal computers (released in 1987) which made use of VRAM for 1024 x 1024 resolution in 16 colors.

Jay Miner assured that the Ranger chipset was completed and fully tested before he left Commodore in hope that one day Commodore would release it. It is unclear if a prototype of a Ranger system exists today. But at that time VRAM was considered expensive compared to DRAM, so Commodore refused to release Ranger for its high price which was unsuitable for the low-end systems like A500 to cover its costs.

In a few years, VRAM costs dropped to be only 20% more than DRAM, so Commodore planned to use VRAM in the AAA chipset which was not released due to Commodore canceling it due to its still high cost for low-end systems.

Some thoughts of a built-in blitter per playfield designed in Ranger had been rejected by Dave Haynie, however on Team Amiga a post explained The Ranger idea:

• Source
  • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Ranger_Chipset
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