Talk:Television Interface Adaptor

Ball
"A 'ball' - a line that is the same color as the playfield. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide."

If the ball is the same color as the playfield, then how can the ball be seen? Isn't this an error? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 71.242.117.28 (talk) 2007-08-27T05:11:57


 * I'm no expert, but I'd guess that the "ball" exists for the purpose of hardware detection of collisions, even though it is not rendered. --Bisqwit (talk) 11:44, 27 November 2007 (UTC)


 * No it's not an error. Generally in most Atari 2600 games the players, missiles, etc. are set against the background, not the playfield, so it would be visible assuming that the background isn't the same color as the playfield. Jeema (talk) 19:00, 14 November 2008 (UTC)


 * See Adventure (Atari 2600) for examples of this. The player was represented by the ball in this game. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:13, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

PAL and NTSC palettes
I wonder about the factuality about the NTSC and PAL palettes shown on this page. When I was a child, I played Missile Command on the Atari 2600, with a PAL system (seeing as I live in Finland which uses PAL), and I distinctly remember that it used the yellow color (#FFFF00): It is this game from where I learned how the TV screen composes the yellow color. Yet, the PAL palette shown on this page shows that the yellow color is impossible in PAL. Where does the error come from? --Bisqwit (talk) 11:38, 27 November 2007 (UTC)
 * This appears on most discussions of the system. See this example... there are many others. Maury Markowitz (talk) 13:16, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

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Background
""The conventional way to draw the playfield is to use a bitmap held in a framebuffer. Each memory location in the framebuffer holds a value that describes pixels on the screen. The display circuitry reads these values out of the buffer and uses it to generate an analog signal for display on a computer monitor. The mapping of the memory to screen locations, or pixels was often limited by the display hardware. On a conventional NTSC color television, maximum resolutions generally fell between 256 and 320 pixels per line, and 192 to 240 lines per screen.[3]""

This part should either be removed or modified in that this is not the case with TIA where there is no framebuffer. The horizontal resolution is also stated wrong (horizontal resolution depends on the particular graphics object, 1 color clock cycle at minimum of which there are 160 visible per scanline). The given reference -which I presume is "Racing the Beam"- doesn't confirm it, either. Actually, It's required that the programmer compose the image by modifying register values in TIA (of which there are only 5; P0, P1, M0, M1, B) on the fly per raster line. Respectively, Playfield is a 20-bits wide register (two and a half bytes) which can be reflected symmetrically (or not, with tricks) so as to expand it to 40 bits wide. Player objects are 8-bits wide, and can be cloned up to 3 copies per each with 15 pixels of fine tuning (-7, +8) for horizontal coordinate. They should also be positioned on the fly during the scan line. Missile graphics are 1-bit values which are either on or off. The above paragraph reflects more of the later 8-bit home computer video chips like VIC-II of C64.Neurosys (talk) 10:25, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

15 Colour Per Row!
It isn't really 15 colours. It's just the usual 4, but alternated on odd / even lines of the screen. So not even blended, really. Just stripes. I would, if you threatened my family's life, grudgingly admit it's kinda cute, but it's in no way revolutionary. It's just stripes. Nothing apart from vertical stripes, and the effect doesn't work well on most of them. So I'm gonna remove the link, since it's not helpful and doesn't illustrate any features of the 2600 or TIA. 188.29.164.104 (talk) 02:00, 23 March 2014 (UTC)

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