The Television Interface Adaptor (TIA) is the custom computer chip, along with a variant of the MOS Technology 6502 constituting the heart of the 1977 Atari Video Computer System game console. The TIA generates the screen display, sound effects, and reads the controllers. At the time the Atari VCS was designed, even small amounts of RAM were expensive. The chip was designed around not having a frame buffer, instead requiring detailed programming to create even a simple display. Development of the CO10444/CO11903 TIA was led by Jay Miner who continued at Atari expanding on the design of the TIA for the Atari 400/800 computers with the ANTIC and CTIA/GTIA chips. Jay Miner later led the design of the custom chips for the Amiga computer. Design Background Around 1975, Atari's engineers at Cyan Engineering led by Steve Mayer and Ron Milner had been considering alternatives to the development dedicated hardware such as application-specific integrated circuits (ASIC) for arcade video games and home video game consoles. Programmable microprocessors had reached the market, but Atari considered them too expensive for a home application. They were limited by cost in options for displaying graphics. At this point in time, most computer graphics were generated by using sprites drawn atop a playfield, which then were translated into an analog signal for display on a CRT video monitor. Sprites would be held as a bitmap in a framebuffer, requiring random-access memory (RAM). RAM was still expensive, costing tens of thousands of dollars per megabyte., and to display a two-color playfield on a 80×48 display would have cost thousands of dollars in memory. On a conventional NTSC color television, maximum resolutions generally fell between 256 and 320 pixels per line, and 192 to 240 lines per screen. In September 1975, MOS Technology introduced the 6502 microprocessor, one of the first low-cost microprocessors on the market. Mayer and Milner arranged to speak to the chip's designer, Chuck Peddle, on using the 6502 as the basis for their programmable video game console. Over the course of a couple of days, the basic design of the Atari VCS was laid out, with Peddle offering Atari the use of the lower-cost MOS Technology 6507 processor and the MOS Technology 6532 RAM-I/O-Timer (RIOT) as the core of the design. Using a breadboard prototype for the display adapter atop a 6502 testbed system, Milner was able to demonstrate the ability to program a