Editing Television Interface Adaptor (section)

===RAM-less design===
Due to the lack of RAM, the TIA differs from the conventional framebuffer in that using the TIA, the screen is composed by manipulating five movable graphic objects (2 players, 2 missiles and 1 ball) and a static playfield object. These are all generated on every scan line from their respective registers, unlike the technique used in a framebuffer-mapped model, requiring the program to update these on every scan line.<ref name="wright">Wright, Steve. [http://web.atari.org/stellaes.pdf "Stella Programmer's Guide"], (in Spanish) December 3, 1979. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160305014811/http://web.atari.org/stellaes.pdf Archived] on March 5, 2016.</ref> Horizontal resolution is not uniform, as its size depends on the particular graphics object. The smallest unit of pixel corresponds to 1 color clock cycle of the chip, of which there are 160 visible ones on a line.<ref name=wright />

The Playfield object consists of a two-and-a-half byte register (20 bits wide), which can be reflected symmetrically or copied as-is to the right half of the screen for 40 bits in total (each bit being 4 color cycles wide). The color that was drawn if the bit was a 1 or a 0 was selected from a pre-defined palette of up to 128 colors (see below) and held in other registers.

The TIA also supported five separate graphics objects consisting of:
*Two 8-pixel horizontal lines which make up the '[[Sprite (computer graphics)|sprite]]s' Player 1 and Player 2. These are single color, can be stretched by a factor of 2 or 4, and can be duplicated or triplicated.
*A 'ball' - a horizontal line that is the same color as the playfield. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide.
*Two 'missiles' - another horizontal line that is the same color as its respective player. It can be one, two, four, or eight pixels wide.

Without RAM-based framebuffers, [[collision detection]] is also complicated. The TIA has hardware collision detection for all of these objects through the use of 15 set/reset [[flip-flop (electronics)|flip-flop]]s and stores a bitmap of collisions, that are typically read during the VBLANK period.<ref name="ieee decuir"/> Registers in the TIA allow the programmer to control the positioning of the graphical objects and their color.

The TIA also provides two channels of one-bit sound. Each channel provides for 32 pitch values and 16 possible bit sequences. There is a 4 bit volume control.<ref name="ieee decuir"/>

Lastly, the TIA has inputs for reading up to four analog paddle controllers using [[potentiometer]]s and for two joystick triggers.<ref name="ieee decuir"/>