chunky pixel mode

[psxphill]

Textured 3D was coming whether you liked it or not and 3DO/Saturn/Playstation all instantly aged the Jaguar/SNES/Megadrive over night. The 486 PC + byte per pixel VGA screen mode also did the same to the Atari and Commodore computers.

A chunky pixel mode on it's own wouldn't have made a huge difference, it would have needed a texture mapper added to the blitter as well.
 
If they could have achieved that around the a500+ timeframe then it could have saved them. The amiga had already started winding down by then and needed a shot in the arm. ECS was not good enough to keep people buying amigas. They could probably have stuck with a 68000 and still had some good games.

[psxphill]

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...

That sounds very complex to shoehorn in. Lisa already ran out of registers and you're going to have to duplicate alot of them for the dual chunky and bitplane mode.
 
I'd prefer the option of 640x512 chunky modes than being able to mix them.