Why is AGA so hard to implement?

[psxphill]

Why hadn%&$#?@!%&$#?@!%&$#?@!8217;t anyone succesufuly been able to clone AGA gfx and just gone straight to 16 & 24 bit!

Because there is no OS support for 16/24 bit AGA.

People see that they can emulate one of the dumb PC graphics chips that were used on RTG cards and get software support for free.

Adding a chunky 8 bit indexed mode and 16 bit direct colour to minimig AGA would be relatively easy. 8 bit indexed (AKA chunky) would run in the same bandwidth as AGA 8 bitplanes, you'd need double the bandwidth for 16 bit direct. So if bandwidth was limited then you could restrict the resolution, but as the data is sequential then you could likely burst it as modern ram has huge rows.

It would be awesome for texture mapping.

[psxphill]

but I do not understand those who wants to ADD stuff to AGA.. why.  there is simply no reason whatsoever to do that.

Because of....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_AA%2B_Chipset

[psxphill]

that exactly ZERO software will use anyway..  so.. no reason

I believe it's possible to write software.

Mh. Depends on your definition of planar.
Byteplanes have been tossed around several times - one pointer for R/G/B each, saving 25% bandwidth. But yes, I agree with your sentiment.

I suspect that causes more problems than it solves for bandwidth. RAM is really fast if you only read sequentially. As soon as you start reading from three different places in RAM it will slow down or you would need to implement burst caches. Which will add a small amount of latency.

I agree it would save RAM when using 24 bit displays, but 16 bit is pretty good at saving RAM too. Just say the extra 8 bits are alpha when using a genlock and move on.