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Joel Cholakians
USA
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Posts 67
19 May 2009 03:00
| EXTERNAL LINK
Sorry if the questions has already been asked, but what uses or similarities to Akiko chip will there be?
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Rob M
United Kingdom
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Posts 29
19 May 2009 05:12
| I understand that Akiko's chunky-planar conversion is easily beaten by 68030 + fast ram, besides Natami will have chunky modes anyway.
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Gunnar von Boehn
Germany
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Posts 5775
19 May 2009 05:38
| Joel Cholakians wrote:
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Sorry if the questions has already been asked, but what uses or similarities to Akiko chip will there be?
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The AKIKO chip is currently not included in SuperAGA.
AKIKO was a hack that was only included to the CD32.
SuperAGA does support real chunky which is much more efficient than the AKIKO was. IMHO there is no software depending on the AKIKO - so the need or benefit of having an AKIKO chip is not there.
But if there would be software depending on AKIKO then including either a real AKIKO or something emulating it would be no problem. Cheers
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Battered Bunny
Australia
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Posts 80
25 May 2009 05:45
| I will disagree with you a little. An Akiko chip would be great for retro gaming. I deliberately purchased CD32 versions of games, knowing that the CD format would last much longer than floppy based software. To contradict myself if there was an official store of downloadable games similar to Lemon Amiga, then the stress of failing floppies would disappear.
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Gunnar von Boehn
Germany
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Posts 5775
25 May 2009 06:11
| Battered Bunny wrote:
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An Akiko chip would be great for retro gaming.
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What you say would be valid if AMIGA games would use the chip.
How many games make use of this chip?
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Battered Bunny
Australia
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Posts 80
25 May 2009 06:28
| It isn't so much which games use the chip, it is more the number of games on CD32 CDs that refuse to work if they do not believe that they are on original hardware. I assume that the chip can be emulated, which would work well especially if the game doesn't physically use the Akiko (this means a small or zero clock cycle penalty). I personally was no fan of the chip, but unlike Theiry and his desperate need for floppy disks, the format was always unreliable, and the reliability has degraded with time. The only realistic way forward for retro gamers is to either use CD, or downloadable files.
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Gunnar von Boehn
Germany
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Posts 5775
25 May 2009 06:39
| Battered Bunny wrote:
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It isn't so much which games use the chip, it is more the number of games on CD32 CDs that refuse to work if they do not believe that they are on original hardware.
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Implementing the chip in HW is not difficult at all.
We speak here of a few hour job.
But as the chip is useless - I would prefer to emulate it in SW to not waste even small chip resources on it.
A simple Software emulation should be fully anough for what you need. Cheers
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Jens Drößler
Germany
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Posts 137
26 May 2009 21:31
| Wouldn't it be easier to build a simple "redirecting device" which will route Akiko accesses to a real chunky mode?
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Samuel D Crow
USA
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Posts 1295
27 May 2009 03:50
| I should think so. Most software that used the Akiko chip used it in a system-friendly way by calling WritePixelArray8() from Graphics.library.
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Jens Drößler
Germany
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Posts 137
27 May 2009 18:14
| So there could be a chunky mode that is 100% compatible with the way Akiko got the data to convert them. Then a small "emulation" that says "I'm here" if software looks for akiko. Every CD32 game should be running then and the additional resources would be pretty low.
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Gunnar von Boehn
Germany
| | (Moderator)
Posts 5775
27 May 2009 19:58
| Jens Drößler wrote:
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So there could be a chunky mode that is 100% compatible with the way Akiko got the data to convert them. Then a small "emulation" that says "I'm here" if software looks for akiko. Every CD32 game should be running then and the additional resources would be pretty low.
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This does not work this way.
AKIKO was just a MATRUX (tm the movie). A game using AKIKO did always use two screens.
One chunky screen.
One planar screen.
Every pixel was copied from the chunky screen to AKIKO and then back from AKIKO to the planar screen.
AKIKO was doing the chunky - planar convert. A real bad, slow and stupid design this was. Natami has so much CPU resources - you don't need AKIKO
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Welcome to the Natami lounge.