simple version of their Tank game. Joe Decuir was hired on to help convert Milner's proof-of-concept to a functional prototype, sufficient for Atari to give the go-ahead for the development to continue. While Decuir worked on the design of the rest of the system, Jay Miner focused on making an ASIC for the display adapter. Early on, the ASIC display adapter was named the Television Interface Adapter (TIA). The cost of RAM remained high as the team began its design, and thus the option to use memory-based framebuffers was dropped from the TIA's design. RAM-less design Due to the lack of RAM, the TIA differs from the conventional framebuffer approach on 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. 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. 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 'sprites' 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-flops and stores a bitmap of collisions, that are typically