Amen to that, was such a waste. Just being able to write to the chip ram by itself would have made it so much more useful. After all, if you are doing software texture-mapped 3D type stuff, you are going to want to have your accumulation buffer in fast ram. You might just get away with reading that to a set of registers once per frame. However, the amount of shuffling you actually had to do with akiko rendered it all but pointless.
I think the point of Akiko was for reading bitmaps from disk to facilitate ports.
For instance, Doesn't Wing Commander contain PC graphics?
So now when you load a bitmap, you push it thru Akiko, now its in Amiga planar format and now you do whatever you want with it. There is no point in keeping it in chunky format and constantly converting it in real time.
I don't think it was meant for any realtime use.
So let me be clear:
A game typically has most of it's graphics in RAM.
The graphics are on disk in chunky format initially.
The game initialized it's 'level' and begins loading all the images it needs.
Each image it read and processed to planar and stored in RAM.
Now your game engine has all the planar graphics it needs to run, start the level.
So, no, Wing Commander was not doing C2P on the fly to my knowledge but only when intializing a level.
