If the word of Harry Sintonen isn't good enough for you I don't know whose is!
Seconded. :cool:
Akikio is nothing but a few mixing registers. You write 32 chunky pixels to the registers and read back / copy to ChipRAM 8 words of planar data (32 bit).
Working with planar graphics directly is - as Piru stated - much slower. In 3D you can't just move/copy bitmaps but you render each pixel individually. Obviously the read-modify-write back for planar (several words!) takes much longer than just writing one chunky byte.
With a fast CPU and FastRAM (and caches!) you can rather quickly convert your chunky buffer to planar but the CD32 has neither, so the 'we have a few spare gates on Akiko, why don't we use them to speed up graphics somehow' approach suggested itself.
