Alphanumeric Television Interface Controller (ANTIC) is a LSI ASIC dedicated to generating 2D computer graphics to be shown on a television screen or computer display. The chip was designed in 1977-1978 for Atari computers released in 1979 and was patented by Atari, Inc. in 1981. ANTIC is also used in the Atari 5200 video game system release in 1982.
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 separately moveable, overlay graphics, that is, "sprites" also known as "Player/Missile graphics" on the Atari.
Atari advertised it as a "true microprocessor", in that it has an instruction set to run programs (called display lists) to process data. Nonetheless 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 does not qualify as a Turing machine in the mathematical sense of an abstracted computation device.
Read more about ANTIC: Features, Versions, Pinout, Registers, Playfield Graphics Modes, The Display List, Limitations, Bugs and Border Conditions, Software-driven Modes
Famous quotes containing the word antic:
“Within the hollow crown
That rounds the mortal temples of a king
Keeps Death his court, and there the antic sits,
Scoffing his state and mocking at his pomp,
Allowing him a breath, a little scene,
To monarchize, be feared, and kill with looks.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)