Continuing the discussion from here: https://amigaworld.net/modules/newbb/viewtopic.php?mode=viewtopic&topic_id=45508&forum=16&start=500&viewmode=flat&order=0#880976

@Hammer

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Hammer wrote: @cdimauro Quote: OK, but that wasn't my point. The context was the CDTV and its market, which is more like a multimedia player / kiosk, and with the ability to run Amiga games (but it wasn't central). Chunky/packed wasn't needed for that, neither a hardware conversion logic. Hardware C2P improves PC ports handling.

Which was NOT the scope of the CDTV, as I've tried to explain.
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Games such as Grind/Dread have extra R&D effort with Blitter-assisted C2P. A500-level hardware has crap Death Mask instead of Grind/Dread. There are three pathways for chunky pixels: 1. Chunky graphics hardware support. Result: zero R&D risk for 3rd party developers. 2. Hardware C2P. Result: reduced R&D risk for 3rd party developers. 3. Blitter-assisted C2P. Needs game-ready SDK code sample to reduce R&D risk for 3rd party developers. Executing "Michael Abrash" level evangelism for VGA's Mode X for Blitter-assisted C2P. Remove software C2P is slow statement in all official documentation since this is self-defeating.

Only the first one made sense and it was also cheap to implement, having the right knowledge of the chipset AND vision.
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During the early 1990s, for each independent game project, 3rd party developers had to reinvent the wheel on Blitter-assisted C2P. Other platforms didn't have this extra R&D effort and risk.

As it was reported on an interview by Haynie, they (the engineers) already knew how important was the packed/chunky graphics ONE - TWO years BEFORE the CD32 project was delivered.

But they resorted to the horrible Akiko "solution", which wasn't even able to take advantage of the integrated DMA controller to completely offload this operation from the (slow) CPU.
And, as usual, very likely WITHOUT talking and having the agreement from the management.

We know that the Amiga chipset was born with planar graphics, but EGA used the same as well, and VGA shown that the same fetched data could be interpreted in completely different ways (e.g. packed/chunky).

A similar thing could have been made with the Amiga, as I've proven on one of my last articles, while maintaining the Amiga identity & full backward-compatibility.