Re: [stella] off the shelf?

Subject: Re: [stella] off the shelf?
From: Greg Miller <gmiller@xxxxxxxx>
Date: Sat, 03 Jan 1998 22:51:28 -0600
Piero Cavina wrote:
> 
> I've always heard that the 2600 was made with off the shelf parts, and this
> would explain how some companies could produce adapters for other systems,
> or clones.
> 
> But this seems strange to me... was the 2600 TIA really a chip that you
> could buy from Radio Shack?! And why should one have bought it, if it was
> used only by Atari inside the 2600?

Basically, the TIA was a simple interface to a television. If you're
building a project that needs to work with a TV, that's nearly the
simplest, cheapest device that would do the job. As a side note, when
Atari introduced the 400 and 800, they used an upgraded TIA (CTIA and
later GTIA) and just tacked on custom microprocessor (ANTIC) to run the
chip in place of the CPU.
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