Talk:CTIA and GTIA

Merge

I merged Color Television Interface Adapter into this article, since as GTIA was essentially an enhanced CTIA there was much overlap and more to gain by keeping the related material together than separate.

If anyone disagrees, please comment here. Thanks!

Fourohfour 16:59, 22 April 2007 (UTC)

This article needs a more neutral name however, since it covers both the the CTIA and GTIA now that its been merged. TIA is out of course, since that's the name of the interface adapter on the Atari 2600. Anyone have any other thoughts for a unified name? I'm leaning towards "Atari 8-bit TIA". --Marty Goldberg (talk) 06:16, 16 February 2008 (UTC)

I highly recommend moving this to GTIA. The CTIA was produced only briefly and can be mentioned in-line without issue. Maury (talk) 21:49, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

Disagreed. Regardless of which had a longer run, the fact is both were produced (CTIA for 3 years alone) and exist in Atari computers. Its not Wikipedia's job to give undue weight to one over the other through the title, the longer production run can simply be noted in the article as it already is. Both the CTIA and GTIA are TIA's, hence the single category (that describes all the contents of the page rather than a specific subset). --Marty Goldberg (talk) 22:18, 13 August 2008 (UTC)

That's beside the point; the point is that no one EVER referred to this device, of any version, as "Atari 8-bit TIA". The wiki needs to name its articles in ways that the user can find them. No one will ever look for "Atari 8-bit TIA", they will look for "GTIA" and maybe "CTIA". A redir of the latter to the former is all that is needed. The Wikipedia:Search engine test is quite clear on this, and returns exactly zero hits that are not originally scraped from this article. "GTIA", on the other hand, returns hundreds of hits. That's a good enough argument right there. Furthermore, the title is extremely confusing because it stresses "TIA", which is a different system entirely. Maury (talk) 21:11, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

That's hardly "besides the point". Disagreed again. TIA is a series of Television Interface Adapters designed at Atari, Maury, starting with the the TIA on the 2600. In fact, as is clearly known, GTIA stands for "George's" Television Interface Adaptor - or George's TIA. The CTIA and GTIA were simply next generation TIA's. Both were in manufactured, produced, and on the market in Atari computers, referred to separately in documentation, etc. etc. etc. One should not be given precedence over the other in an ENCYCLOPEDIC article. Likewise, as you your self pointed out, there was a previous 2600 TIA - hence the need to differentiate between the TIA's in the 2600 line vs. the 8-bit computer line. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 21:56, 18 August 2008 (UTC)

(undent) Ummm, are you sure you have read my statements above correctly, and understand exactly what I am proposing? I am proposing a change of the article name from "Atari 8-bit TIA", which exists only on the wiki, to "GTIA" (or its long form), which exists everywhere. I propose no changes at all to the article content. Maury (talk) 12:27, 19 August 2008 (UTC)

Idiocy

The first sentence makes no sense. What series? CTIA and GTIA form the series? They are respective to what? Total bullshit! --88.192.12.234 (talk) 12:19, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

CTIA/GTIA

I have undone your recent edit. I don't want to sound like a grue, but you should only "outright" remove edits if they are vandalism or other bad-faith edits, and I'm sure you'll agree mine were not. RVing is a fairly heavyweight process. In the future I suggest just dropping a note on the user or article talk page.

In this case, Joe's talk does appear to address the issues you note. In particular, the "Colleen requirements" slide states that the new machine had to leapfrog the 2600, which is what the article was stating. The same slide states that the "Atari 400 was a game machine".

If you do not feel that the talk supports the interpretation in the article, I'm sure I can dig up further references, as I've personally talked to Joe about this issue.

Maury Markowitz (talk) 16:08, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Indeed, the presentation confirms Colleen being designed as an improvement over Stella, I didn't notice that. However the other issues for which I've done the revert are still valid:

• Still, no backing up for the statement about the 1977 design date;
• The analysis of ANTIC's graphic modes does not belong here, as the CTIA/GTIA chip does not produce them, and has nothing to do with how many different resolutions are available. This should be moved to the ANTIC article;
• Even so, such technical details shouldn't be placed in the History section (save for a single sentence about CTIA and TIA sharing a common "philosophy") since there already is a "Functions" section for that.

Anyway, you're right about RVing constructive edits; I'll behave :) I'd like to get any references regarding whether CTIA was initially designed only for a new game console and the home computer idea was an afterthought, and whether CTIA was meant to be coupled with ANTIC from the very start of the design process. I couldn't find those by myself, maybe you'll work something out. --Krótki (talk) 22:33, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

I realize this can't be used as a reference, but thought I'd give you some direction for your looking for sources: In my lengthy talks with Joe, the home computer or "PCS" was not an afterthought. Briefly at Cyan it was for a console and then it quickly moved towards a console and computer - long before the chipset work was actually done. The plan was initially for a low end computer that would be a replacement console for the 2600 and a high end "serious" computer. They wanted the console to have a keyboard on it for programmers to be able to code directly on the console, an idea they later transferred to the Amiga. The chip set was planned to be used for both Consumer and Coin. Those both lasted only a short while, the game console replacement idea was nixed by Kassar and Warner and instead it was move to a complimentary low end "entry" computers. Kassar was responsible for the push for these to be more easy to use plug and play "appliances" and even talked about going color coordinated like Jobs did with the iMac years later. The custom chips never wound up being used in coin because they were synced to television standards, and by that time coin was moving beyond that. According to Joe, GTIA resulted from George doing some last minute "improvements to the graphics modes" before production/shipping. That introduced some bugs and they stayed with CTIA until that was ironed out. I know we've found that there were actually a small allotment of '79's that actually have the early GTIA instead of the CTIA. Also worth it to note that initially, some of the team also wanted an open bus architecture like the Apple II's, but Kassar nixed that as well, wanting to stay proprietary - which is what moved them to having to make the peripherals "smart" peripherals. --Marty Goldberg (talk) 23:15, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedia is not a programming manual

Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia not a datasheet. The article should be a broad explanation of what the chip does and where it was used. There doesn't need to be twenty pages describing the function of every single register bit. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 2.124.245.91 (talk) 20:10, 5 March 2020 (UTC)

Agreed, it's very, very verbose. AtomCrusher (talk) 16:29, 23 September 2020 (UTC)