[feintruled]

> The Aga chipset of the 1200/4000 stupidly only added 2 more bitplanes. The CD32 chip actually had byte-per-pixel (chunky) graphics modes but the omission from the 1200 was fatal.

The intention was good, but the Akiko chip was functionally almost useless. It was soon surpassed by CPU chunky to planar algorithms. I don't think it was ever even used in any serious way by any released games (though it might have been used to help with FMV).

[whizzter]

Ah, I was under the impression that it had a native chunky mode but it was a built-in C2P routine? Anyhow, seems it was useful (1) when running on stock CD32's but not in conjunction with faster machines.

1: https://forum.amiga.org/index.php?topic=51616.msg544232#msg5...

[actionfromafar]

Which brings me to my pet peeve, the already slow 68020 (680ec20) at 14MHz was crippled by, even though it had a 32-bit bus, was only connected to a 16-bit RAM bus. (Chipram.)

This 16-bit memory (2 megs) is also where the framebuffer and audio lives, so the stock CPU in A1200 has to share bandwidth with display signal generation and the graphics and audio processing.

All-in-all, it meant the Amiga 1200 had only about twice the memory throughput of the Amiga 500. (About 5 megabytes/s vs about 10 megabytes/s)

If the A1200 had at least some extra 32-bit memory (it existed as a third party add-on) the CPU could have had its own uncontested memory with a troughput of about 20-40 megabyte/s.

Imagine the difference it would have made if the machine had just a little extra memory.

That's just a tiny detail. That the chipset wasn't 32-bit was another disappointment.

The bigger problem was that Commodore as a company was aimless.

[icedchai]

Yeah, and it took ~7 years to make those marginal improvements over the earlier Amiga chipset! I'm ignoring ECS, since it barely added anything over OCS for the average user.