I think the point of Akiko was for reading bitmaps from disk to facilitate ports.
That makes no sense either though. Why put a format on the CD that you need to convert when loading? It takes longer to load and you can't control / customise the bitmaps for the platform.
Typically if you need to convert a format you do that offline, check it to see if it's good enough, and re-author the asset specifically for the target platform if it isn't good enough.
Since it was Wing Commander that'd be a one off quality control pass for a single artist and a batch file.
No the more I read about Akiko it sounds more and more like it was an idea that someone just managed to wedge into some spare space. Perhaps it was meant to be something more but got pulled back into an almost pointless feature. Happens all the time.
Andy
