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]

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.