ANTIC

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. Under the direction of Jay Miner, the chip was designed in 1977-1978 by Joe Decuir, Francois Michel, and Steve Smith for Atari 8-bit 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 is not Turing complete.

The list below describes ANTIC's inherent hardware capabilities meaning the intended functionality of the hardware by itself, not including results achieved by CPU-serviced interrupts or display kernels frequently driving register changes.

ANTIC Reads via DMA and executes a program called the "Display List" controlling these Playfield features:

Other Register-based functions:

by part number

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