chunky pixel mode

[itix]

But the 486s were in £1000+ systems, and the A1200 was a £400 (then £300) system.

Which brings us onto the other failing: No £600 A1230 with 40MHz '030 and 4MB RAM at release. Upselling - Commodore hadn't heard of it, apart from that hard drive included SKU.

At Release:
A1200 2MB '020 14MHz: £399
A1200 4MB '020 14MHz: £479
A1200 4MB '030 25MHz: £549
A1200 4MB '030 40MHz: £599
A2200 4MB '030 40MHz: £799 (A1200 in desktop case w/ separate keyboard)

People would have easily been persuaded to get a higher level A1200 in shops because the price increments aren't too shocking.

On PC games got better with faster CPU but on Amiga (2D) games rarely got better with faster CPU.

[itix]

For a certain type of games sure. We'd all have loved to have UFO Enemy Unknown be less pokey. But there were plenty of areas where CPU power was important: Coding, all sorts of applications (including graphics which was a popular use of the amiga community), and later games.

It'd also permit more advanced games. Look at things like Genetic Species and Onescapee for some simple things that were possible with a decent 030 and AGA.

Better CPU allows better 3D games, better productivity apps and so on but PC world was already having SVGA as a standard and games used it.

After all in mid 90s Amiga was losing its fight on all fronts: 68k CPU arch was dying, AGA couldnt compete against SVGA, the OS development was slow and 4 channel 8-bit audio (Paula) was aging. Even if Commodore did few more things right they didnt have a chance.

And of course all those fancy companies making fancy games for PC...

[itix]

Akiko? Next to nothing. Akiko hat a series of registers into which the CPU could write a sequence of chunky data, and a second set of registers where the converted planar data could be obtained. This avoids a lot of shifting and masking for the C2P transformation, but the CPU still has to touch each pixel manually.

I recall on 020 Akiko was faster than the software C2P, on 030 they got roughly even and on 040 the software C2P was always faster...

In particular, there is no DMA channel that could automate the process, C2P is still a CPU hog. If Akiko could be feed by the blitter, or would have been part of the blitter, or part of Agnus as part of the bitplane DMA - this would have helped. But the given design is a minimalistic solution that does not help much.

Could be I remember wrong, it has been so many years since this information was relevant... but I recall C2P was not great bottleneck on faster CPUs. Fast 68060 and C2P was a non-issue again.