Television Interface Adapter

The Television Interface Adapter (TIA) is the custom chip that is the heart of the Atari 2600 games console and was created by Jay Miner of Amiga fame.The TIA is responsible for generating the picture on the television set as well as providing access to features in hardware for the purpose of generating the game graphics. Due to the cost of memory at the time TIA has no specific Video RAM and only generates a single line of video at a time. The video is created from data in registers that control a background colour, a playfield made up of a small amount of pixel data which is stretched across half the video line and may be duplicated or mirrored across the other half and 5 graphics objects consisting of:Two 8-pixel lines which make up the 'sprites' Player 1 and Player 2. These are single color and can be stretched by a factor of 2 or 4.A 'ball' - a line that is the same color as the playfield. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide.Two 'missiles' - a line that is the same color as it respective player. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide
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