ANTIC

Alphanumeric Television Interface Controller (ANTIC) is an LSI ASIC dedicated to generating 2D computer graphics to be shown on a television screen or computer display. Under the direction of Jay Miner, the chip was designed in 1977-1978 by Joe Decuir, Francois Michel, and Steve Smith for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers first released in 1979 and was patented by Atari, Inc. in 1981. ANTIC is also used in the Atari 5200 video game system released in 1982, which shares most of the same hardware as the 8-bit computers. Alphanumeric Television Interface Controller (ANTIC) is an LSI ASIC dedicated to generating 2D computer graphics to be shown on a television screen or computer display. Under the direction of Jay Miner, the chip was designed in 1977-1978 by Joe Decuir, Francois Michel, and Steve Smith for the Atari 8-bit family of home computers first released in 1979 and was patented by Atari, Inc. in 1981. ANTIC is also used in the Atari 5200 video game system released in 1982, which shares most of the same hardware as the 8-bit computers. ANTIC is responsible for the generation of playfield graphics which is delivered as a datastream to the related CTIA/GTIA chip. The CTIA/GTIA provides the coloring of the playfield graphics, and is responsible for adding overlaid sprites referred to as 'Player/Missile graphics' by Atari. Atari advertised it as a true microprocessor, in that it has an instruction set to run programs (called display lists) to process data. ANTIC has no capacity for writing back computed values to memory, it merely reads data from memory and processes it for output to the screen, therefore it is not Turing complete.