The Standard Television Interface Chip or STIC is a video encoder chip produced by

General Instrument General Instrument (GI) was an American electronics manufacturer based in Horsham, Pennsylvania, specializing in semiconductors and cable television equipment. They formed in New York City in 1923 as an electronics manufacturer. During the 1950s, ...

as AY-3-8900/AY-3-8900-1 and used on the Mattel

Intellivision The Intellivision is a home video game console released by Mattel, Mattel Electronics in 1979. The name is a portmanteau of "intelligent television". Development began in 1977, the same year as the launch of its main competitor, the Atari 2600. I ...

. The chip provides all the display functions on the machine, and works as an internal timer. Resolution is 167 x 105 pixels in

NTSC The first American standard for analog television broadcast was developed by National Television System Committee (NTSC)National Television System Committee (1951–1953), Report and Reports of Panel No. 11, 11-A, 12–19, with Some supplement ...

and 168 x 104 pixels in

PAL Phase Alternating Line (PAL) is a colour encoding system for analogue television. It was one of three major analogue colour television standards, the others being NTSC and SECAM. In most countries it was broadcast at 625 lines, 50 fields (25 ...

, over which movable objects (MOBs) can be placed. These are restricted to a visible area of 159 x 96 pixels. Other objects, such as a 20 x 12 matrix of 8x8 background cards can be used to create scenery or provide game information. The STIC also computes collision information between the objects and screen borders. There are multiple display modes depending on how objects are handles, such as ''Color Stack'', ''Colored Squares'' and ''Foreground/Background'' mode.

Characteristics

*operates at 4 MHz or 3.579545 MHz (NTSC) *14-bit multiplexed data/address bus shared with CPU *20x12 tiled playfield, tiles are 8x8

pixel In digital imaging, a pixel (abbreviated px), pel, or picture element is the smallest addressable element in a raster image, or the smallest point in an all points addressable display device. In most digital display devices, pixels are the smal ...

s for a resolution of 159x96 (right pixel not displayed) **16 color palette, two colors per tile **''Foreground/Background'' mode; all 16 colors available for background and colors 1–8 available for foreground per tile; grom cards limited to the first 64 **''Color Stack'' mode; all 16 colors available for foreground per tile; background colour from a four colour rotating stack of any four colors, all 277 grom and gram cards available **''Colored Squares'' mode allows each tile to have four different colored 4x4 blocks as in ''

Snafu SNAFU is an acronym that is widely used to stand for the sarcastic expression Situation normal: all fucked up. It is a well-known example of military acronym slang. It is sometimes bowdlerized to "all fouled up" or similar. It means that the s ...

''); first seven colors available for foreground blocks; background colour from the color stack *8 sprites (all visible on the same scanline). Hardware supports the following features per-sprite: **coordinate addressable off screen for smooth edge entries and exits **Size selection: 8x16 or 8 pixels wide by 8 half-pixels high **Stretching: horizontal (1× or 2×) and vertical (1×, 2×, 4× or 8×) **Mirroring: horizontal and vertical **Collision detection: sprite to sprite, sprite to background, and sprite to screen border **Priority: selects whether sprite appears in front of or behind background. * fine horizontal and vertical pixel scrolling * all STIC attributes and GRAM re-programmable at VBLANK, 60 times a second

Color Palette

A 16 color palette is available, divided into two sets. Primary Color Set Pastel Color Set ''Note: The displayed colors are approximate. Actual tones varied according to the

analog television Analog television is the original television technology that uses analog signals to transmit video and audio. In an analog television broadcast, the brightness, colors and sound are represented by amplitude, instantaneous phase and frequency, ...

standard and quality of the

CRT display CRT or Crt may refer to: Science, technology, and mathematics Medicine and biology * Calreticulin, a protein * Capillary refill time, for blood to refill capillaries * Cardiac resynchronization therapy and CRT defibrillator (CRT-D) * Catheter- ...

.''

References

{{reflist

External links

Datasheet

PAL version discussion

Color palette discussion
Graphics chips Texas Instruments hardware Intellivision

Characteristics

Color Palette

See also

References

External links