What is the real power of Akiko chip in cd32 ?

[psxphill]

Chunky AND planer doesn't mix and is hugely epensive....ie AAA chipset trainwreck.

VGA did it, which is what AGA was supposed to compete with.
 
AAA was a trainwreck because engineering and management had a disfunctional relationship. There was no way that AAA was ever going to be financially successful, but they burned money on it for years.
 
Adding chunky to AGA during it's design phase would have been free in comparison to the money spent on AAA.
 
And adding a texture mapper would have saved them.

[psxphill]

I have heard that the CD32 patched graphics.library/WriteChunkyPixels() to use the Akiko so it might have transparently sped up more programs than Wing Commander while not making them incompatible to non CD32 Amigas.

I was under the impression that commodore only documented using Akiko by calling WriteChunkyPixels.

[psxphill]

SWe are talking games and Amigas for games use are stock A1200 + 2mb Fast Ram at best, so yes Akiko would have been usefull (as would have IDE connector and Fast Ram SIMM slot on CD32 motherboard).

akiko was too little too late. AGA had trouble competing with the SNES and it's mode 7 graphics.
 
The advantage of the Amiga was always the power of custom chips instead of using brute processing power.
 
The blitter in AGA was basically the same as the one they wire wrapped in the early 80's, that was their mistake. They could even have lived with bitplanes, because it's only cpu rendering which makes that beneficial.

[psxphill]

True, but you would still probably want to render to fast ram and then copy the entire frame to chip ram in one go...

No, you don't want to render to fast ram. The blitter should have been able to rotate and scale bitmaps. The way saturn drew polygons (they called them distorted sprites) wouldn't have been much of a stretch to add to the amiga blitter. It would be less efficient but it could have used bitplanes for the screen and textures, so lisa wouldn't necessarily have needed any changes.
 
If would have to have been introduced in 1990 instead of the a500+ to stop the snes, by 1995 it would have been time to do something much better. In the meantime games like Wolfenstein & doom would have come out on the Amiga first.
 
Add a cheap cd drive (like the cdtv cr or cd32) and they would have been unbeatable. Piracy wouldn't have been so widespread so the developers wouldn't have jumped ship.
 
The Amiga was cutting edge for 1985, but they milked it for far too long. On the A1000 launch day they should have been working on the chips that would come out in 5 years time (ECS was aiming too low and AAA was aiming too high).
 
The A1000 went from nothing to launch in three years, it then took a futher seven years to add 2 bitplanes & some higher resolution modes. Everyone then tried to fix the aging architecture with fast ram and accelerators, that wasn't ever the Amiga way.

[psxphill]

While I tend agree, let's be completely frank about it: What productive use is an Amiga good for these days anyhow? (-; Or to put this in other terms: While I love to play with software and programs, would you call the net result "productive", or is it just that: "Playing with obsolete software?".

You can be productive using obsolete software, how efficient you are would be the real test.

Some people will ignore that they could be more efficient using a pc or a tablet, and it would be cheaper. I'm sure there are some things you can use an Amiga for that doesn't impact your efficiency, but I gave in when Windows XP came out. I have plenty of retro computers and consoles that I mess around with still.

[psxphill]

You soldiered on a lot longer than I did.
But there are still a few things an Amiga can do adequately.
For instance, I've never seen the need for heavy hitting power to do basic text editing or word processing, just good software.
Not everything requires high performance systems.

I agree with text editing, a writer who just needs to send off some ascii text once a year is unlikely to notice any major impact to their efficiency. Although getting that text off your Amiga is going to need CrossDOS/USB/Ethernet & CrossDOS onto a floppy is likely to be a problem for the receiver.

I think you'd be better off with a PC for "word processing" if you include what used to be referred to as DTP (Desktop Publishing).

In the very unlikely event that you've got software that improves your efficiency over any other platform then WinUAE gives you the best of both worlds.

[psxphill]

I try not to be too critical on that point, or I'd keep falling back to Windows, leaving my Android and Linux hardware unused as well as my Amiga related systems.
Besides, the line between basic text editing and word processing can get pretty fuzzy, its a matter of how much formatting power you need.

I would rather be brutally honest and aim for efficiency when I'm trying to be productive and then use the spare time to do things I enjoy with other hardware.

[psxphill]

A1200 acc boards are shrinking, there are AFAIK no technical obstacles preventing something similar as ACA500 for CD32, "ACA32" if you like, that would let you use A1200 acc boards on CD32.

It's even easier for the CD32 as it's practically an A1200 slot on the back.

[psxphill]

Disagree with your there. CD32 accelerators have a big problem - volume available, and airflow.

SX-64 was a hot little bugger - literally.

Of course if you put something hot inside the CD32 then you have a problem, but you're assuming that a CD32 vampire would be as hot as a SX-64 and also that a CD32 vampire would be inside the CD32 case. It could easily stick out the back if heat was a problem.