akiko and anims ?

[turrican3]

Hi guys could akiko be use to display animations or movies ??
Could it be faster than with the usual amiga chipset ??

[Dynamic_Computi]

I suppose in theory since it converts Chunky to Planar, but I have never heard of anyone writing a program to do that. I think Akiko may not be very well documented. The HAM6 and HAM8 movies are the fastest I have seen on the Amiga, but they are HUGE!

[turrican3]

I think too that some format could be faster with the use of akiko.
But how much ??? And does it worth the effort to make a player ??

[jotd]

if the player is system compliant and use WriteChunkyPixels gfx library already, then it uses akiko without knowing it. http://eab.abime.net/showthread.php?t=80650

I suppose it's not a miracle performance wise: the display mode is still planar 8 not chunky. http://amigadev.elowar.com/read/ADCD.../node033C.html

GfxBase->ChunkyToPlanarPtr is either NULL, or a pointer to a HW
register used to aid in the process of converting 8-bit chunky
pixel data into the bit-plane format used by the Amiga custom
display chips. If NULL, then such hardware is not present.

If an expansion device provides hardware which operates compatibly,
than it can install the HW address into this pointer at boot time,
and the system will use it.

So a fast c2p routine with fastmemory on a high-end amiga is probably faster than this akiko stuff. The real good thing would have been chunky gfx mode, not this 8 bitplane nonsense.

[desiv]

Originally Posted by jotd

So a fast c2p routine with fastmemory on a high-end amiga is probably faster than this akiko stuff. The real good thing would have been chunky gfx mode, not this 8 bitplane nonsense.

Related but off topic question.. ;-)


The Graffiti supposedly has a chunky mode.
I've tried it with the few games that support it (I think DoomAttack?) and while it worked, it didn't seem noticeably faster than the C2P routines.


Does anyone know if that is just a software issue (DoomAttack Graffiti support not optimized)?

Or is there something about the Graffiti chunky modes?
Or is chunky just not that much faster?


I would think if it were that much faster and Graffiti could do it well, there should be a lot more Graffiti's out there???


Just a thought..


desiv

[jotd]

I suppose that the Graffiti makes up for lack of CPU, but it still sucks. I think I bought one, and sold it (or dumped it, don't remember) because it was heating too much and not really useful/supported.

Hardware not natively supported rarely takes off. The cool part of Akiko is that it's in every CD32. ATM the only interesting part is "CD music while playing" (that I'm currently developping).

68060 with fast c2p beats that (DOOM with 060 was really smooth). But bitplanes+chipmem is really a couple of losers...

PC VGA has native chunky and not that chipmem stuff just pure CPU and it's simple. Too bad that the amiga didn't get chunky MODE natively with AGA... (besides the planar modes that the blitter can handle). Even within chipmem it would have rocked and would have allowed a lot of smooth ports of SDL games/MAME/emulators/whatever.

[meynaf]

Originally Posted by jotd

Even within chipmem it would have rocked and would have allowed a lot of smooth ports of SDL games/MAME/emulators/whatever.

I doubt.
If you have fast cpu (68060) then chunky or planar does not matter anymore as the c2p can be made to run at copymem speed. And, chunky or planar, you have to transfer your data to some displayable area.
The bottleneck is really the chipmem.
If we had fast video ram then planar would have become the problem.