What is the real power of Akiko chip in cd32 ?

[Karlos]

Simple point is nobody bought 040s to play games 68030 was a minimal improvement mhz per mhz over 020 ergo A4000/030 25mhz was slow and dead end for games.

Speak for yourself. I got my first 040 not long after the AB3D2 demo first appeared

My point is spot on thanks.  So getting back on topic in relevance to A1200 and CD32 (ie 1992 and 1993) chunky screen gaming, and accepting the known fact that A1200 had to compete out of the box for less than half the price of a 386DX for £899 with monitor blah blah......

Sorry, but no. Perhaps if the Akiko were implemented in a somewhat better fashion it would be useful, but it wasn't.

Let's imagine we have a 020+FastRAM+Akiko.

Having to first calculate 32 pixels of worth of data in fast ram (no data cache on 020), then copy it as 8 longwords to the Akiko. Then read it back again as 8 long words, then write each of those 8 longword to different addresses (offset into each bitplane) in your chip RAM. Rinse and repeat until the entire buffer has been converted.

Had the Akiko been implemented in such a fashion that you fed it your 8 bitplane addresses and then simply wrote 8 longwords of chunky pixels to it at a time and it in turn wrote them to ChipRAM incrementing the address pointers as it went, then it wouldn't have sucked.

[ChaosLord]

Had the Akiko been implemented in such a fashion that you fed it your 8 bitplane addresses and then simply wrote 8 longwords of chunky pixels to it at a time and it in turn wrote them to ChipRAM incrementing the address pointers as it went, then it wouldn't have sucked.

+1

[bloodline]

Had the Akiko been implemented in such a fashion that you fed it your 8 bitplane addresses and then simply wrote 8 longwords of chunky pixels to it at a time and it in turn wrote them to ChipRAM incrementing the address pointers as it went, then it wouldn't have sucked.

Should have been a blitter mode :-/

[Hammer]

akiko was too little too late. AGA had trouble competing with the SNES and it's mode 7 graphics.
 
The advantage of the Amiga was always the power of custom chips instead of using brute processing power.
 
The blitter in AGA was basically the same as the one they wire wrapped in the early 80's, that was their mistake. They could even have lived with bitplanes, because it's only cpu rendering which makes that beneficial.

Brian The Lion has "Mode 7" type effects.

[Tension]

Brian The Lion has "Mode 7" type effects.

Please elaborate.

[Crumb]

An interesting note, with my recent port of ScummVM over to AGA (which uses the chipset for double buffering, all of the graphics are generated as chunky screen in FASTRAM) I've found that most speed limitations are not with the AGA chipset, C2P or even the slow bus....it's normally my 030 which is too slow to generate the chunky screen in time.   This is true up to 320x200 8bit, for SuperVGA (640x480 8bit) the AGA chipset/bus speed/C2P lets the side down and you really need to use RTG

Depending on the game it may be more effective to use graphics.library calls and avoid chunky2planar completely.

Using AmigaOS functions instead of using the miggy like a dumb framebuffer would bring advantages, e.g. screenshake can be done without problems with AmigaOS functions like ScrollVPort(), there's no need to copy memory as that slows down the system without any need.

[Zac67]

Should have been a blitter mode :-/

It should have been a Lisa mode - so no data at all would have to get moved twice (or even more).

[itix]

Or Akiko on A1200 AND proper programming would have made games on Amiga 1200 for 99% of people expecting to play better games than a 1985 A1000 a bit less 'old' looking in 93/94.

To be honest the software library for Amiga in 1985/1986 wasnt very good either...

[bloodline]

It should have been a Lisa mode - so no data at all would have to get moved twice (or even more).

True, but you would still probably want to render to fast ram and then copy the entire frame to chip ram in one go...

[psxphill]

True, but you would still probably want to render to fast ram and then copy the entire frame to chip ram in one go...

No, you don't want to render to fast ram. The blitter should have been able to rotate and scale bitmaps. The way saturn drew polygons (they called them distorted sprites) wouldn't have been much of a stretch to add to the amiga blitter. It would be less efficient but it could have used bitplanes for the screen and textures, so lisa wouldn't necessarily have needed any changes.
 
If would have to have been introduced in 1990 instead of the a500+ to stop the snes, by 1995 it would have been time to do something much better. In the meantime games like Wolfenstein & doom would have come out on the Amiga first.
 
Add a cheap cd drive (like the cdtv cr or cd32) and they would have been unbeatable. Piracy wouldn't have been so widespread so the developers wouldn't have jumped ship.
 
The Amiga was cutting edge for 1985, but they milked it for far too long. On the A1000 launch day they should have been working on the chips that would come out in 5 years time (ECS was aiming too low and AAA was aiming too high).
 
The A1000 went from nothing to launch in three years, it then took a futher seven years to add 2 bitplanes & some higher resolution modes. Everyone then tried to fix the aging architecture with fast ram and accelerators, that wasn't ever the Amiga way.

[warpdesign]

The A1000 went from nothing to launch in three years, it then took a futher seven years to add 2 bitplanes & some higher resolution modes. Everyone then tried to fix the aging architecture with fast ram and accelerators, that wasn't ever the Amiga way.

I 200% agree with that! It took them 7 years to update some parts of the chipset, not even all parts (sound remained unchanged...). Too little, far too late.

[Zac67]

100% ack - the 3000 should've had AGA and possibly some intermediate AAA by 1994 before adopting the other world's chips (on a PCI platform). But that didn't happen. Apple did it that way (mostly).

[Mequa]

On the subject of Akiko Chunky-to-Planar, Toni Wilen released a new beta of WinUAE today which incorporated an optimised Akiko C2P algorithm I submitted in C code for WinUAE/PUAE.

Although it tested twice as fast as the old WinUAE algorithm in isolation, it's unclear whether due to CPU caching this will actually be any faster in practical use than the old algorithm (it makes for a very tiny difference anyway in overall CD32 emulation), but Toni's source code did say the original algorithm was, quote, a "piece of crap", and he decided to switch to my version instead, so I guess this is a small improvement.

At least it works when I tried it with CD32 Wing Commander and Microcosm.

[Tripitaka]

No, you don't want to render to fast ram. The blitter should have been able to rotate and scale bitmaps. The way saturn drew polygons (they called them distorted sprites) wouldn't have been much of a stretch to add to the amiga blitter. It would be less efficient but it could have used bitplanes for the screen and textures, so lisa wouldn't necessarily have needed any changes.
 
If would have to have been introduced in 1990 instead of the a500+ to stop the snes, by 1995 it would have been time to do something much better. In the meantime games like Wolfenstein & doom would have come out on the Amiga first.
 
Add a cheap cd drive (like the cdtv cr or cd32) and they would have been unbeatable. Piracy wouldn't have been so widespread so the developers wouldn't have jumped ship.
 
The Amiga was cutting edge for 1985, but they milked it for far too long. On the A1000 launch day they should have been working on the chips that would come out in 5 years time (ECS was aiming too low and AAA was aiming too high).
 
The A1000 went from nothing to launch in three years, it then took a futher seven years to add 2 bitplanes & some higher resolution modes. Everyone then tried to fix the aging architecture with fast ram and accelerators, that wasn't ever the Amiga way.

That was the most wonderful post of how it should have happened I've ever read. If I ever get a Tardis I'll test it out.

[Pentad]

...The Amiga was cutting edge for 1985, but they milked it for far too long. On the A1000 launch day they should have been working on the chips that would come out in 5 years time (ECS was aiming too low and AAA was aiming too high).
 
The A1000 went from nothing to launch in three years, it then took a futher seven years to add 2 bitplanes & some higher resolution modes. Everyone then tried to fix the aging architecture with fast ram and accelerators, that wasn't ever the Amiga way.

Having just caught up with this thread I would agree with the above quote.

I hate to dabble in "What if" but I have always wondered "what if" Commodore would have kept Jay Miner, et al, on the payroll and let them continue to upgrade the chipset.  From my understanding, Jay and others were working on the Ranger chipset when Commodore shot them down.

I think that the Ranger chipset was a year or so away from release after the Amiga 1000 which would have kept the technology in an upgrade cycle.  I also believe that Jay would have pushed to keep the technology moving where Commodore left it to stagnate.  

I have always loved the Amiga 3000 and felt it was the last product Commodore truly put to market with polish and effort.  That was also a pivotal moment in the market when Apple and IBM hadn't quite caught up with the Amiga chipset.  Sadly, the 3000 lacked any significant upgrade to the chipset which was an opportunity missed by Commodore.  A path that led to the 1994 closing.

I think if the Amiga 3000 would have had something along the lines of AGA and the 4000 a much more powerful chipset things would have gone different.

Atlas, it is only conjecture and speculation but I think it would have been interesting to see what Jay Miner et al would have done for the line if they would have remained full-time.

-P

[skolman]

c2p Gloom 1x1 256 colors

68020/14 - 61.6 ms
68020/14+fast - 54.6 ms
68020/14+akiko - 24.2 ms
68030/50+fast - 21.7 ms
68040/25+fast - 18.6 ms
68020/14+fast+akiko - 17.6 ms
68060/50+fast - 9.1 ms



My result:

A1200 BlizzardPPC + 68060/60+fast - 8.5 ms
A1200 BlizzardPPC + 68060/66+fast - 8 ms

Question, what will be the result on SX32Pro 68030/50+fast+akiko?