Talk:ANTIC

Example program

Is the example program appropriate to an encyclopedia? I don't feel so, personally. Fourohfour 11:17, 6 June 2007 (UTC)

Why wouldn't it? Would an encyclopedia entry on crossword puzzles showing a finished solution (describing HOW and WHAT the puzzle looks like) be appropriate? Same thing. I say leave it. cbmeeks (talk) 18:58, 10 October 2008 (UTC)

The program does not actually show anything useful about how to program the ANTIC. To someone not intimately familiar with low-level programming in an Atari 400/800, the integers in the DATA lines are totally meaningless. A similar program written in assembly language would actually be more useful since it would show the native instructions and the relationship between an instruction and its corresponding data. And trying to explain that in the BASIC code would make the example unwieldy and even less encyclopedic.

Personally, I think the example program should be removed entirely - the prose description for how the ANTIC reads and processes display lists is perfectly sufficient for the average reader. The program as written is not likely to be of interest beyond a simple copy/paste and maybe some minor tinkering. As I mentioned, a listing of assembly code would likely be of more interest to programmers and tech enthusiasts - those people are more likely to have the knowledge and training needed to understand assembly and will find it more intuitive than the BASIC code, and people who don't fall into that category will likely not be able to make sense of either version of the program. — KieferSkunk (talk) — 18:10, 20 May 2011 (UTC)

I support removing the program. It does not help the reader understand anything about the topic. --Kvng (talk) 13:13, 22 May 2011 (UTC)

Agree with KieferSkunk. —Ruud 17:00, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

Removing most of this article

The Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It is not a instruction manual. A massive expansion to this article has added considering instruction and reference manual content, which simply doesn't belong here - and there are numerous good sources on the 'net that already cover this material. Unless someone has a very good reason that this information needs to be archived here, I will attempt to dramatically shorten it in the new future. Maury Markowitz (talk) 11:32, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Most of the material seems appropriate to me describing how the chip works. I did my best not to arbitrarily delete prior material and reorganized it which has arguably made the Scrolling section a bit too chatty. The only other thing thing that approaches a "How To" like format is the Display List Interrupt discussion which is due to the non-obvious nature of DLI operation. Synthetoonz (talk) 13:59, 17 October 2013 (UTC)

Turing Complete?

If one were to consider the CTIA/GTIA a glue chip for the Antic (which for the sake of this idea it is), then under the guidance of the CPU, computed values by the ANTIC could be read back into memory, via Player/Missile/Playground collision registers. Not only can they be read back in, but true screen position output could be determined by raster scanning a 1 pixel missile over the whole of the background, like slow scanning camera. Is this not correct enough to call it Turing complete, since the 65C02 could (acting as yet more glue) instruct a change back to the DLI to modify the output observed? I know this is REALLY stretching what acts as glue, but saying there is no way to read output is wrong... it just can't do it on it's own. AE7EC (talk) 08:21, 12 August 2016 (UTC)

Encyclopaedia, not a datasheet

This article reads like a technical datasheet or a programming manual. It should provide a broad overview of what the chip does and where it was used. There doesn't need to be page after page of detailed explanations of what every single bit in every register does. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 94.5.115.8 (talk) 08:53, 18 July 2017 (UTC)