CTIA and GTIA
Color Television Interface Adaptor[1] (CTIA) and its successor Graphic Television Interface Adaptor[1] (GTIA) are custom chips used in the Atari 8-bit computers and Atari 5200 home video game console. In these systems, a CTIA or GTIA chip works together with ANTIC to produce the video display. ANTIC generates the playfield graphics (text and bitmap) while CTIA/GTIA provides the color for the playfield and adds overlay objects known as player/missile graphics (sprites). Under the direction of Jay Miner, the CTIA/GTIA chips were designed by George McLeod with technical assistance of Steve Smith.[2][3][4]
Color Television Interface Adaptor and Graphic Television Interface Adaptor are names of the chips as stated in the Atari field service manual.[1] Various publications named the chips differently, sometimes using the alternative spelling Adapter[5][6] or Graphics,[3] or claiming that the "C" in "CTIA" stands for Colleen/Candy[5] and "G" in "GTIA" is for George.[3][5][6][7]
History[edit]
2600 and TIA[edit]
Atari had built their first display driver chip, the Television Interface Adaptor but universally referred to as the TIA, as part of the Atari 2600 console.[8] The TIA display logically consisted of two primary sets of objects, the "players" and "missiles" that represented moving objects, and the "playfield" which represented the static background image on which the action took place. The chip used data in memory registers to produce digital signals that were converted in realtime via a digital-to-analog converter and RF modulator to produce a television display.
The conventional way to draw the playfield is to use a bitmap held in a frame buffer, in which each memory location in the frame buffer represents one or more locations on the screen. In the case of the 2600, which normally used a resolution of 160x192 pixels, a frame buffer would need to have at least 160x192/8 = 3840 bytes of memory. Built in an era where RAM was very expensive, the TIA could not afford this solution.
Instead, the system implemented a display system that used a single 20-bit memory register that could be copied or mirrored on the right half of the screen to make what was effectively a 40-bit display. Each location could be displayed in one of four colors, from a palette of 128 possible colors. The TIA also included several other display objects, the "players" and "missiles". These consisted of two 8-bit wide objects known as "players", a single 1-bit object known as the "ball", and two 1-bit "missiles". All of these objects could be moved to arbitrary horizontal locations via settings in other registers.
The key to the TIA system, and the 2600's low price, was that the system implemented only enough memory to draw a single line of the display, all of which held in registers. To draw an entire screen full of data, the user code would wait until the television display reached the right side of the screen and update the registers for the playfield and player/missiles to correctly reflect the next line on the display. This scheme drew the screen line-by-line from program code on the ROM cartridge, a technique known as "racing the beam".
CTIA[edit]
Atari initially estimated that the 2600 would have short market lifetime of three years when it was designed in 1976, which meant the company would need a new design by 1979.[8] Initially this new design was simply an updated 2600-like game console, and was built around a similar basic design, simply updated. Work on what would become the CTIA started in 1977, and aimed at delivering a system with twice the resolution and twice the number of colours. Moreover, by varying the number of colours in the playfield, much higher resolutions up to 320 pixels horizontally could be supported. Players and missiles were also updated, including four 8-bit players and four 2-bit missiles, but also allowing an additional mode to combine the four missiles into a fifth player.
Shortly after design began, the home computer revolution started in earnest in the later half of 1977. In response, Atari decided to release two versions of the new machine, a low-end model as a games console, and a high-end version as a home computer.[8] In either role, a more complex playfield would be needed, especially support for character graphics in the computer role. Design of the CTIA was well advanced at this point, so instead of a redesign a clever solution was provided by adding a second chip that would effectively automate the process of racing the beam. Instead of the user's programming updating the CTIA's registers based on its interrupt timing, the new ANTIC would handle this chore, reading data from a framebuffer and feeding that to the CTIA on the fly.
As a result of these changes, the new chips provide greatly improved number and selection of graphics modes over the TIA. Instead of a single playfield mode with 20 or 40 bits of resolution, the CTIA/ANTIC pair can display six text modes and eight graphics modes with various resolutions and color depths, allowing the programmer to choose a balance between resolution, colours, and memory use for their display.
The list below describes CTIA/GTIA's inherent hardware capabilities meaning the intended functionality of the hardware itself, not including results achieved by CPU-serviced interrupts or display kernels driving frequent register changes.
CTIA/GTIA is a television interface device with the following features:
by part number
Atari, Inc. intended to combine functions of the ANTIC and GTIA chips in one integrated circuit to reduce production costs of Atari computers and 5200 consoles. Two such prototype circuits were being developed, however none of them entered production.
Player/Missile Graphics (sprites) operation[edit]
A hardware "sprite" system is handled by CTIA/GTIA. The official ATARI name for the sprite system is "Player/Missile Graphics", since it was designed to reduce the need to manipulate display memory for fast-moving objects, such as the "player" and his weapons, "missiles", in a shoot 'em up game.
A Player is essentially a glyph 8 pixels wide and 256 TV lines tall, and has two colors: the background (transparent) (0 in the glyph) and the foreground (1). A Missile object is similar, but only 2 pixels wide. CTIA/GTIA combines the Player/Missile objects' pixels with the Playfield pixels according to their priority. Transparent (0) player pixels have no effect on the Playfield and display either a Playfield or background pixel without change. All Player/Missile objects' normal pixel width is one color clock. A register value can set the Player or Missile pixels' width to 1, 2, or 4 color clocks wide.
The Player/Missile implementation by CTIA/GTIA is similar to the TIA's. A Player is an 8-bit value or pattern at a specified horizontal position which automatically repeats for each scan line or until the pattern is changed in the register. Missiles are 2-bits wide and share one pattern register, so that four, 2-bit wide values occupy the 8-bit wide pattern register, but each missile has an independent horizontal position and size. Player/Missile objects extend the height of the display including the screen border. That is, the default implementation of Player/Missile graphics by CTIA/GTIA is a stripe down the screen. While seemingly limited this method facilitates Player/Missile graphics use as alternate colored vertical borders or separators on a display, and when priority values are set to put Player/Missile pixels behind playfield pixels they can be used to add additional colors to a display. All Players and Missiles set at maximum width and placed side by side can cover the entire normal width Playfield.
CTIA/GTIA supports several options controlling Player/Missile color. The PRIOR/GPRIOR register value can switch the four Missiles between two color display options—each Missile (0 to 3) expresses the color of the associated Player object (0 to 3) or all Missiles show the color of register COLPF3/COLOR3. When Missiles are similarly colored they can be treated as a fifth player, but correct placement on screen still requires storing values in all four Missile Horizontal Position registers. PRIOR/GPRIOR also controls a feature that causes the overlapping pixels of two Players to generate a third color allowing multi-colored Player objects at the expense of reducing the number of available objects. Finally, PRIOR/GPRIOR can be used to change the foreground/background layering (called, "priority") of Player/Missile pixels vs Playfield pixels, and can create priority conflicts that predictably affect the colors displayed.
The conventional idea of a sprite with an image/pattern that varies vertically is also built into the Player/Missile graphics system. The ANTIC chip includes a feature to perform DMA to automatically feed new pixel patterns to CTIA/GTIA as the display is generated. This can be done for each scan line or every other scan line resulting in Player/Missile pixels one or two scan lines tall. In this way the Player/Missile object could be considered an extremely tall character in a font, 8 bits/pixels wide, by the height of the display.
Moving the Player/Missile objects horizontally is as simple as changing a register in the CTIA/GTIA (in Atari BASIC, a single POKE statement moves a player or missile horizontally). Moving an object vertically is achieved by either block moving the definition of the glyph to a new location in the Player or Missile bitmap, or by rotating the entire Player/Missile bitmap (128 or 256 bytes). The worst case rotation of the entire bitmap is still quite fast in 6502 machine language, even though the 6502 lacks a block-move instruction found in the 8080. Since the sprite is exactly 128 or 256 bytes long, the indexing can be easily accommodated in a byte-wide register on the 6502. Atari BASIC lacks a high speed memory movement command and moving memory using BASIC PEEK()s and POKE(s) is painfully slow. Atari BASIC programs using Player/Missile graphics have other options for performing high speed memory moves. One method is calling a short machine language routine via the USR() function to perform the memory moves. Another option is utilizing a large string as the Player/Missile memory map and performing string copy commands which result in memory movement at machine language speed.
Careful use of Player/Missile graphics with the other graphics features of the Atari hardware can make graphics programming, particularly games, significantly simpler.
The GTIA chip is backward compatible with the CTIA, and adds 3 color interpretations for the 14 "normal" ANTIC Playfield graphics modes. The normal color interpretation of the CTIA chip is limited, per scanline, to a maximum of 4 colors in Map modes or 5 colors in Text modes (plus 4 colors for Player/Missile graphics) unless special programming techniques are used. The three, new color interpretations in GTIA provide a theoretical total of 56 graphics modes (14 ANTIC modes multiplied by four possible color interpretations). However, only the graphics modes based on high-resolution, 1⁄2 color clock pixels (that is, Antic text modes 2, 3, and graphics mode F) are capable of fully expressing the color palettes of these 3 new color interpretations. The three additional color interpretations use the information in two color clocks (four bits) to generate a pixel in one of 16 color values. This changes a mode F display from 2 colors per pixel, 320 pixels horizontally, one scan line per mode line, to 16 colors and 80 pixels horizontally. The additional color interpretations allow the following:
Of these modes, Atari BASIC Graphics 9 is particularly notable. It enables the Atari to display gray-scale digitized photographs, which despite their low resolution were very impressive at the time. Additionally, by allowing 16 shades of a single hue rather than the 8 shades available in other graphics modes, it increases the amount of different colors the Atari could display from 128 to 256. Unfortunately, this feature is limited for use in this mode only, which due to its low resolution was not widely used.
The Antic 2 and 3 text modes are capable of displaying the same color ranges as mode F graphics when using the GTIA's alternate color interpretations. However, since the pixel reduction also applies and turns 8 pixel wide, 2 color text into 2 pixel wide, 16 color blocks these modes are unsuitable for actual text, and so these graphics modes are not popular outside of demos. Effective use of the GTIA color interpretation feature with text modes requires a carefully constructed character set treating characters as pixels. This method allows display of an apparent GTIA "high resolution" graphics mode that would ordinarily occupy 8K of RAM to instead use only about 2K (1K for the character set, and 1K for the screen RAM and display list.)
The GTIA also fixed an error in CTIA that caused graphics to be misaligned by "half a color clock". The side effect of the fix was that programs that relied on color artifacts in high-resolution monochrome modes would show a different pair of colors.[5][15]
Atari owners can determine if their machine is equipped with the CTIA or GTIA by executing the BASIC command POKE 623,64. If the screen blackens after execution, the machine is equipped with the new GTIA chip. If it stays blue, the machine has a CTIA chip instead.
Bugs[edit]
The last Atari XE computers made for the Eastern European market were built in China. Many if not all have a buggy PAL GTIA chip. The luma values in Graphics 9 and higher are at fault, appearing as stripes. Replacing the chip fixes the problem. Also, there have been attempts to fix faulty GTIA chips with some external circuitry.