STIC

The STIC provides the video display for the Intellivision Master Component. It is capable of displaying a background resolution of 160x96 pixels and up to 8 hardware sprites, referred to as Moveable OBjects or MOBs.

Background
The background area is rendered by the STIC as a series of "cards", which are blocks of 8x8 pixels. Thus the background is composed of 20 cards horizontally and 12 cards vertically for a total of 240 cards.

The cards to be displayed by the STIC are loaded by the program into an area of memory referred to as the BACKground TABle or BACKTAB. The BACKTAB is located within a portion of the 16-bit RAM memory space from $0200-$02EF. During each screen refresh, the STIC reads each card from the BACKTAB and draws it onscreen. How the STIC interprets each card in the BACKTAB depends on whether the STIC is in Foreground/Background mode or Color Stack mode.