Standard Television Interface Chip

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The Standard Television Interface Chip [1] or STIC is a video encoder chip produced by General Instrument as AY-3-8900/AY-3-8900-1 and used on the Mattel Intellivision. [2] [3] [4] [5]

Contents

The chip provides all the display functions on the machine, and works as an internal timer. Resolution is 167 × 105 pixels in NTSC and 168 × 104 pixels in PAL, [1] over which movable objects (MOBs) can be placed. These are restricted to a visible area of 159 × 96 pixels. [6] Other objects, such as a 20 × 12 matrix of 8×8 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

Color Palette

A 16 color palette is available, divided into two sets. [6]

Primary Color Set [8]

BlackBlueRedTanDark GreenGreenYellowWhite

Pastel Color Set [8]

GrayCyanOrangeBrownPinkLight BlueYellow GreenPurple

Note: The displayed colors are approximate. Actual tones varied according to the analog television standard and quality of the CRT display.

See also

References

  1. 1 2 AY-3-8900 Standard Television Interface Chip Datasheet (PDF). General Instrument.
  2. "Mattel Intellivision FAQ". www.intellivision.us.
  3. "Standard Television Interface Chip" (PDF). Retrieved 2019-07-23.
  4. "STANDARD TELEVISION INTERFACE CIRCUIT (STIC)" . Retrieved 2019-07-23.
  5. "STIC – Intellivision Wiki". wiki.intellivision.us.
  6. 1 2 Zbiciak, Joe. "STANDARD TELEVISION INTERFACE CIRCUIT (STIC)". jzIntv!.
  7. "Intellivision Classic Video Game System / Intellivision Master Component". Intellivision Lives. Archived from the original on 2017-06-30.
  8. 1 2 "mamedev/mame". GitHub. 10 December 2021.