chunky pixel mode

[bloodline]

Chunky pixel mode, put very simply mean that the CPU only needs a single write to the memory per pixel. On the Amiga, due to the planar pixel mode, the CPU has to make 8 separate writes to the memory per pixel (for 256 colours), this can be optimised a bit... But it's still quite an overhead when compared to chunky pixel mode.

[bloodline]

Put simply if Amiga had chunky pixel mode Doom would run faster on Amiga than it does. Or possibly even a simple 256 colour game in super hi-res interlace mode (which is pretty much only good as a static screen due to speed on AGA)

And the reason we had the insane architecture of 8 bitplanes not byte per pixel in 256 colour displays was...........

... Because AGA was little more than a bug fix to ECS, and back in the mid 80's bitplanes made sense as you could very carefully control the amount of memory used in your gfx... Once ram became cheap in the 90's bitplanes were a nasty bit of legacy

[bloodline]

I could not agree more.  The Amiga was wonderful in 1985 but Commodore never did anything to the hardware after.  Oh, there were minor upgrades but the Amiga's amazing designs of the 80's became a liability in the 90's.  

I could be wrong about this in 1988 didn't R&D show some amazing chip designs that would have be the next gen for the Amiga?  I thought I recalled that they said -looking back- it would have been like the Voodoo I from 3DFX for the PC years later.  

Sad, really....

-P

You mean the legendary "Ranger Chipset"... Designed by the original team while still at Commodore... But never put into production... Apparently it would have been a killer!!!

[bloodline]

Just thinking about the possibilities... If Lisa had been given a 256 colour chunky pixel mode at 320 x 256, plus if she had 128k of ram as the chunky display buffer mapped to the chipset address space by where she had priority, and if the regular planar display could be mixed over the chunky display... We might have had something really cool to play with at relatively little extra cost...