CD32 was not so much of a big bet as a hail mary while hoping to buy enough time for their other chipsets to be completed. They clearly did see a big future the

CD32 was not so much of a big bet as a hail mary while hoping to buy enough time for their other chipsets to be completed. They clearly did see a big future there - up to and including the point where their last chipset (Hombre) was planned to be usable either as a standalone chipset for consoles or set-top boxes or as a chipset for a larger computer (or a high end graphics card). But the CD32 is little more than a CDTV-like variant of the A1200 with a quick and dirty attempt at mitigating the by then disastrous miscalculation of not having any chunky modes in AGA by adding chunk-to-planar conversion in hardware into Akiko (CD32 specific chip that otherwise served to cost-reduce a bunch of glue logic and controllers for the CD-ROM and game ports), but it was very basic (write 32 8-bit chunky pixels to Akiko registers; read 8 32-bit words for 8-bitplanes worth of 32 pixels back out).